The case of the strange computer

I got a call for a home machine that was infected with a virus. We picked up the machine and cleaned it up. It seemed to be working well when we returned it to the client.

The client called and said it was not working. We went out and , sure enough, it was hardly responding. We took it back to the shop. Once again it worked well.

Conclusion: A piece of hardware at the client's site was crashing the computer

Workaround for Vista photo printing

I have an HP Laserjet 1012 on a print server on my soho network. The problem is that it is not visible from the Vista print dialog. I needed to print some docs that were scanned as jpgs

I found an easy workaround. Simply print the pics to a pdf. If you have acrobat, it will be easy to so. If not, you can download a free appp such as cutepdf. Once you have the pages in pdfc formt you should be able to easily print the pdf.


Now,if the eggheads at microsoft would just fix the print feature...

Samsung Saga and Skype

Skype is a great addition for your Samsung Saga or any other Smartphone.

If you are running Windows Mobile, you can download an app from Skype for your phone. Make sure you have an account and either a plan or prepaid balance.

I found myself ij a situation where I had to make a call. The building I was in was not letttting me get phone service but I did have WIFI.

Making a call via Skype was easy...Just remember to begin the number to call with +1 in th US.

I didnt have a headset which made it harder for my son to hear me but it did work.

samsung saga power conservation

I found myself sitting in a hospital for an extended period of time. I had thrown a bunch of aa batteries and my iGo charger in my pocket. The problem was that I was burninv batteries pretty quicckly. It dawned on me that sine I didn't have phone service, I should turn off the phone and the bluetgooth. Once I did that, the battery drain wa a lot lower.


Just remember to turn gthe phone and bluetooth back one.

Joomla Backups

If you are using Joomla, you need to consider a serious backup plan. I found Joomla Pack which is a backup system for Joomla. You can find it here.

The install process is pretty straightforward.

1. Download the zip file to your pc
2. Run the extension installer from your Joomla Control Panel
3. Run your backups

There is a little more than that, but not much. First of all, the app suggested storing your backups in a folder above your HTML root. That makes a lot of sense. Creating that folder in FTP was a snap. Then you have to change the Joomlapack configuration to match that folder for backup.

The other suggestion was to change the configuration to save as a Joomlapack archive instead of a zip. Joomlapack has the capability to restore your entire Joomla site.

While you are downloading Joomlapack, you should also download Kickstart which is the tool which will allow you to restore the site.

I need to play around with this a bit more, but I do feel a lot better knowing that it is possible to easily back up your Joomla sites. I haven't tried a restore yet but will look into it.

Joomla Fix - H2 tag in the Milkyway template cuts off ys and gs

I was using the Milky Way template and an H2 heading tag. When I looked at the page in IE7, I found that lower case descending characters were cut off. (y's and g's). I played around with the CSS with no luck. I did some searching and found that there is a pretty simple fix. Simply remove the width:100% from the H2 tag (Found that here)

Anyway, that worked like a charm and the descending characters are fully formed.

Joomla as a replacement for Frontpage

I have been looking for something to replace Frontpage for a while. I have looked at Expressionweb but wasnt sold on that as a solution.

I have been working with Joomla and am convinced that it is a good replacement. Joomla is a content management system. As such it will allow clients to manage their own content once the site is up.

Norton Toolbar

I happened to be doing a Google Search where one of my sites showed up in the Search Results. I noticed that, unlike many of the other sites, it had a grey button next to it instead of the green checkmark button.

For people running a recent version of Norton Internet Security and the NIS Browser toolbar, the green checkmark means that Norton has tested the site and found it to be safe. A grey button means they haven't tested it yet and a red button means that they found security issues.

A lot of people run Norton so it seemed to be a good idea to check all of my sites. A number of them are new and have low traffic. They were all grey button sites. If you click on the grey button, you get a message that

Summary
This site has not been tested yet. It has now been scheduled for testing.

I'm not sure how long the testing process takes, but I think it was worthwhile getting all of the sites in the testing que. The question now, is to find a way to do the same thing for McAfee , AVG and any other security toolbar provider. I just thing that not having a green mark might hurt traffic a bit.

300 Bucks for a Verizon Samsung Saga THAT DOESN"T WORK

I purchased Samsung Sagas from Verizon for me and my son. Mine is working OK. His keeps going into a mode where the phone will not work. It will not send or receive calls nor will it work with data except with wifi. When you try to dial, you get a message that there is no service. IOW, I have a three hundred dollar worthless piece of junk.

When we took it back to the store, they contacted support and were told that it was a known issue. Supposedly there was a download available on the Verizon website. We could not find it. The phone seemed to work OK for a couple of days. Today my son came home and said that the data wasn't working nor was the phone. I contacted support and they supposedly reset everything. An hour later, the phone was not working again. I called support again and this tech said it was a known issue. Supposedly no patch is available yet.

Their initial response was to return the phone to the store. That was a problem for a couple of reasons (1) the timeframe on the 70 dollar rebate was running out and I could not return the phone to the store if I removed the barcodes and (2) our son will be going on a number of class trips and I want him to have a working phone.

We ended up with Verizon agreeing to ship a replacement phone directly to me. In the meantime, I still had my LG envy sitting there with a half charged battery. Verizon switched the service to the Envy so now my son at least has a working phone.

The Tech Support was patient and helpful considering I wasn't in the best of mood having paid 300 bucks for a non working phone. He said that I was the first person with a problem with the phone.

So... Now we have to wait for the replacement phone to arrive, then get the store to swap the data on the phones, then we need to ship the old phone back and hope that the replacement is not one of the phones affected by the glitch.

Windows Mobile - Emailing a URL with a Saga

I was using interent explorer on my Samsung Saga running windows mobile. I wanted to email the url of a page I was on to my wife and son. Clicking the mouse and holding it brought up the context menu and I selected 'paste'.

So far, so good. Then I opened my email account in messaging and tried to paste the URL into the body of a message that I created. The context menu would only allow a paste into the subject, not into the body of the message.

I found a fairly easy workaround. I went into MENU, MY TEXT, EDIT MY TEXT MESSAGES and replaced one of the text messages with the URL by simply pasting it in. I was then able to paste the url contained in the MY TEXT items into the body of the message.

It worked great.

The joy of hibernation for laptops

I have found that the hibernation mode is the best for my laptop. I take the laptop with me most of the time. This means i am regularly shutting it.

If i try to shut it down, that take s a lot of time. Quite often, I am in a hurry to get out the door.


I set the laptop to allow hibernation. Hibernation is a state where the contents of memory gets saved to disk and the machine shuts down completely. When you power back up, your workspace is read back into memory leaving you with all the windows you had previously.

I set the power scheme so that the machine hibernates when shut while on battery. This is done through the Control Panel, System, Power Settings. You want to pay attention to the action taken when you shut the lid when on battery.

All i need to do when leaving a location is to remove the power cord and then shut the lid. the hibernation process will finish while the laptop is in the bag .


The advantages to this setup are :

• the machine shuts down which prevents overheating. In hibernation the power is off. That also means that there is almost no battery drain.
• The time to get the machine into the travel bag is minimized.
• When you restart, all of your windows and data are where they were when you shut down. That way, you can continue where you left off without restarting apps and reloading data.

If you just put the system into the standby mode instead of hibernation, there is a slow but steady drain on the battery. If you don't plug the machine into AC power, your battery will usually be flat within a day.

I

I got a little tired of having to root through my laptop bag looking for things like earphones, usb hubs , usb cables etc.

I did a couple of simple things to get a little better organized

• I bought a pair of clear vinyl pencil cases from Officemax. The nice thing is I can easily see what is in each bag. As a bonus, it makes things a little easier for the screeners at the airport
• I had a mini set of headphones which kept getting tangled into a Gordian Knot. A really simple solution was to take an old first aid adhesive spool. I simply wind the cord from the earphones around the spool and secure that with a velcro strap. It's fast and easy.
• I bought one of those multi usb cables. It is basically a USB extension cable with an assortment of the common tips. That works great also.
• One thing I do want to get is one of those 'roll up' ethernet cables. They simply store the ethernet cable in a retractable spool.

So the end result is I got rid of all the junk and now have things organized a whole lot better.

Verizon FIOS - A wireless SSID mystery solved - Two SSIDs showing

I'm on about my fourth Actiontec router from Verizon Fios. It was working fine until today. I was just using my Samsung Saga as a calculator when a message came up asking for my key.

A little bit later I found

1. The router had reset. When I logged onto it, it was asking me to set a password
2. My network was showing.
3. I was connected using my normal SSID (A) with my wireless laptop.
4. When I went into the Basement, my samsung Saga was showing a weak signal for my SSID of (A) but showing a strong signal for the SSID on the router label.
5. The wireless settings in the router were showing the (B) SSID, not the one I had Set (A)

This was getting a bit confusing. How could my wireless laptop have a connection on my SSID (A) when it appeared that was no longer on the router. I had Verizon escalate it and the tech agreed that what I was seeing was impossible. I had to agree.

As we were talking, it hit me. I had a secondary Wireless access point set up using my SSID (A), which is near the laptop. Now, it made sense. The WAP was the one with my SSID. The router had been reset. I went back into the router and reset the SSID and Key and everything is back to normal.

The question remains as to why the router reset. We have ordered FIOS TV so perhaps the verizon people reset it for some reason. This could be a pain as I have some port forwarding set up which also got reset. Once I get it back to normal, I'll print that page out and hang it near the router and keep a copy on my laptop

Saga Saga - A tale of two browsers

So far the Samsung Saga running Window Mobile Pro 6.x has been working out great. It has Opera and Explorer installed. Having two browsers is nice because some pages load a bit slowly. If that is the case, you can switch over to your secondary browser and do some surfing there.

Also, not every site wants to work with a given mobile browser. Having more than one browser makes it more likely that you will be able to get to a site.

The downside is that you need to remember which sites work with which browsers but that isn't that hard.

I've found that enabling the mobile mode for Opera really helps the readability of most sites. To do that you go to the Opera Menu, Settings (by hitting the "up arrow" icon again) Display, Mobile view.

You can tweak Explorer Mobile for mobile browsing by going to the menu and choosing "One Column". That usually makes pages easier to read than the full screen mode.

How to embed Youtube videos in your Blogger or other blog

There is a little trick to being able to embed a youtube video in your blogger or other blog.

Let's start with the idea that videos can be a great asset to many different types of blogs. They can add some really rich content.

The trick is to get the video embedded in Blogger.

Here is a little step by step guide

1. Start a new post in Blogger.
2. Find a video you want to include in your blog. Often you will find a video posted on another blog. Start playing the video.
3. Look at the bottom right of the youtube player. There should be a little gizmo you can click. When you click it, you will see 3 choices stacked on top of each other. Choose the bottom icon.
4. What you should see next is a choice of embed or link. You can copy the code from the embed area. Note that some Youtube publishers disable the ability to embed
5. ALTERNATE - as an alternative, you can usually double click an embedded youtube video which should pop up a new window with the Youtube page for that video. You will see the code for embedding near the top right of the Youtube page
6. Once you have the code, you can paste it into your Blog post. The trick is that you have to go into the EDIT HTML mode. Look at your compose page in blogger. You should see two tabs at the top right of where you enter the body of your post. They should be labelled EDIT HTML and COMPOSE. Normally, you work in the COMPOSE mode because you can format your text and add pictures more easily.
7. In this case, when we are in COMPOSE mode, we want to postion the cursor where we want the video to appear. It helps to have a blank line or two before and after that point.
8. Now, click the EDIT HTML tab. Your cursor should be in the correct position. Then choose and EDIT PASTE and hit RETURN. You will see about 10 lines of HTML code. That is the code to embed the video.
9. Now, you can go back to COMPOSE and finish your post. When you are done publish the post.
10. View your post to see if things went right or not.

There you have it. It should work for you. Once in a while, you will not get the entire embed code when you copy it. The code should end up being over 8 lines or so when you paste it.

enjoy!!!