Category: Geek Stuff

It’s been a long time since I answered a reader’s question here on the site, so let’s do this thing!

Reader Jeff was setting up a computer for a co-worker, and wanted to place several website shortcuts on the computer’s desktop. Dragging the website icon from the browser’s address bar to the desktop created the shortcut, but the problem was that those shortcuts only had generic icons, and not the “website icons” Jeff wanted. So how can you create a desktop shortcut for a website that uses the site’s actual icon?

Well, first of all, those icons are called “favicons”, and in most cases they’re located at www.domain.com/favicon.ico. You can use Firefox or Chrome to load each address and save the icon as an ICO file. You can also do this with Internet Explorer, but in many cases IE will insist on saving the file as a BMP file. You can sometimes rename the extension of the saved BMP file to ICO, but a lot of times IE will mangle the file header and you’ll get an error message when you try to actually use it. So just use Firefox or Chrome if possible.

Save each favicon.ico file in a permanent location with a unique, meaningful file name (such as jimcofer.ico). All you have to do then is right-click each desktop icon, choose “Properties” and then click the “Change Icon” button. Use the “Browse” button to locate the correct ICO file you saved in the previous step, then repeat for any additional icons.

Note that the desktop icons will now be “tied” to the saved icons. If you move the saved icons (for example, from My Documents\Icons to My Documents\Stuff\Icons) you’ll need to re-map them via Explorer.

If you’ve been using Outlook for some time, you’ve probably got a folder structure that works for you. And you probably also have a lot of email that could be archived out of your mail storage file.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s all-or-nothing solution to the issue – AutoArchiving – is quite limited. You can only archive items by their date. You can’t, for instance, tell Outlook to archive all 6 month old emails except categorized ones. Nor can you tell Outlook to archive all emails except this or that folder. You could always copy emails to a new data file manually, but that would mean recreating the folder structure, which can be a lot of work.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could replicate your folder structure in a new data file, and move older emails to it as needed?

You can, and it’s a simple, if drawn out, process:

1) Open Outlook and click “File” > “Import and Export”.

2) Choose “Export to a file”, and then click “Next”.

3) Choose “Personal Folder File (.pst)”, and then click Next.

4) On the next screen, select the top of the hierarchy (usually listed as “Personal Folders”) and make sure that “Include subfolders” is checked, and then click “Next”.

5) Choose a unique name for the new data file (such as “outlookfolders.pst”) as well as a location for the new data file (such as the desktop), and then click “Finish”.

6) If you see an additional screen called “Create Microsoft Personal Folders”, just click “OK”.

Depending on the size of your email archive and the speed of your computer, this process can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 45 minutes or more.

Continue reading “Copying Outlook’s Folder Structure”

VLC is one of the best media players around, mainly because the app can play almost any video file you throw at it. However, it does have one strange quirk: after installing (or upgrading) it, you might see this dialog box when you try to open a video file:

The font cache is responsible for displaying subtitles in the VLC window. Which is fine… but sometimes the dialog box can hang, or the “less than a few minutes” can turn in to 20 or 30 minutes, or the box appears every time you open a video file. And all of those things can be annoying.

There are two routes you can take to fix this.

The first is to delete the cache and start over. To do this, type %APPDATA% into the Start Menu’s run box (Windows XP) or search box (Vista\7). Delete the “VLC” folder in the Explorer window that opens and try opening VLC again. The “building font cache” window will appear again, but (hopefully) this time the cache will be compiled correctly and you’ll only see it once.

If you’ve tried this and find that it doesn’t work for you, open VLC and choose Tools > Preferences. Look in the lower left corner of the preferences window and make sure that “All” is selected under “Show Settings”. Then click Video > Subtitles\OSD. Change the value of “Text rendering module” from “Default” to “Dummy font rendering functions” and then click “Save”. This will disable font caching completely.

“Everything old is new again”, or so the old saying goes. The current buzzword in IT is “The Cloud”, which, at its most basic, means “storing data on a server instead of a desktop PC”. In many ways, this is an idea as old as computing itself, and isn’t all that exciting.

However, today’s “New Cloud” is much more than that. It’s not just about storing data on a server, it’s about presenting that data, too. Companies want to write desktop applications that can access cloud data, but they also want to create webapps for remote users that look and feel like traditional desktop apps. They also want to create smartphone apps that allow executives and traveling salespeople to manipulate cloud data in a format that fits their phones.

Most analysts predict a war in the very near future… a war between traditional software companies (like Microsoft and Adobe) who have made billions off desktop applications, and between upstarts (like, well, Google) that will offer similar applications over the Internet. To give just one example, Google is hoping to vanquish both Microsoft Office and competitors like the open-source OpenOffice and IBM’s Lotus Symphony with Google Docs. Results, so far, are mixed.

But Microsoft isn’t going to just lie there and take it like a roofied-up sorority pledge. The company has created its own online suite – Office Web Apps – which includes capable versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. As webapps, they’re available to anyone with a web browser and an Internet connection. And, as of this moment, they’re free.

Continue reading “Office Starter vs. Office Web Apps… fight!”

Ahhhhh… memories of the 80s, and the technology thereof:

Toothpicking the cable box – The first cable boxes had a row of 12-15 buttons on them, and a slider switch to choose the channel row, like this:

If you put the slider on the right channel and carefully inserted a toothpick into the top of the button, you could (sort of) get the scrambled channels, which, for teenage boys, usually meant The Playboy Channel. Cable companies were always warning against “toothpick damage” in their monthly bills, on the informational channels, and on stickers put on the boxes themselves… thus basically telling you how to do it. My family moved in 1984, and our new cable company’s boxes just had a giant dial on them that went from 2-99. You could fold an index card in half and stick it under the dial and accomplish the same thing as the toothpick trick.

Cable Guides – Speaking of cable, you used to get these little TV Guide-like magazines with each cable bill that gave you the listings of every movie in the upcoming month. You still see these in hotels sometimes, especially in Myrtle Beach for some reason, but they stopped sending them out to consumers years ago.

Programming a VCR sucked – Why did this always suck? I mean, from a UI perspective? It seems like VCR manufacturers went out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to set a VCR. Our first VCR (a 150lb. model with a wired remote) was actually as easy as setting a digital alarm clock: there were two toggle switches (OFF\ON and START\END) and two buttons to select the hour and minute. So you’d flip the START toggle to START and select the start time, flip it to END and choose the end time, then flick the OFF\ON toggle to ON. Easy peasy. But so many people whined about it being “difficult” that VCR makers tried hundreds of tricks to make it easier (anyone remember VCR Plus+?). Unfortunately, this made each model different, thus paradoxically making it more difficult, and in the end it was worse than using Lotus Notes.

Continue reading “80s Tech Memories”

NTBACKUP was the backup application included in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. For a backup application, it was reliable, simple and did its job well. But Microsoft ditched it for the all-new Windows Backup and Restore Center in Windows Vista. It’s a welcome change, as NTBACKUP was looking quite dated, especially compared to image-based products like TrueImage and Ghost.

NTBACKUP isn’t included in Vista or 7, but there may come a time when you might need to restore a file from a BKF backup. After all, there are tons of Windows Server 2003 boxes still chugging along out there, even though IT staff might have updated their desktops to Vista or 7 ages ago. So what do you do when you need NTBACKUP in Vista or 7?

You just go to any physical or virtual XP install and copy the following files from the SYSTEM32 folder to a USB drive or network share:

ntbackup.exe
ntmsapi.dll
vssapi.dll

Keeping the files in the same folder, you can now run NTBACKUP on your Vista or 7 machine. When you start the app, you will probably get the following error message:

This error is expected. Removable Storage Manager is disabled in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and doesn’t exist at all in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. So just click OK and continue. You can then locate the BKF file using the browse feature and restore the file(s) as necessary.

You probably won’t want to use this to actually back up a Server 2008 or Windows 7 installation, but it’s nice to know that you can still restore files from backups if needed.

Microsoft’s Security Essentials product is an excellent antivirus tool. But it does have its quirks. For instance, you can only set it to scan your system daily or weekly, with no other choice in-between. But one of the biggest problems with the client is that it only updates its virus signatures every 24 hours. While that’s not a problem for most, it can be annoying for laptop users who aren’t connected to the Internet full-time, or to people that regularly visit “less than secure” types of websites (wink-wink!).

You can easily change the frequency at which MSE checks for updates. Just cut and paste the following into your favorite text editor:

"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\Antimalware\MpCmdRun.exe" -SignatureUpdate

Save the file as something like MSEUPDATE.CMD, then add it to your system as a Scheduled Task that runs minimized every x hours. MSE will then update according to your schedule.

There is a Registry hack that will allow you to do this too, but the problem with it is that any time MS updates the client, there’s a chance this setting could be overridden by the update. “My” hack is external, and therefore won’t be affected by any client updates.

If you have Java and Firefox on your computer, you’ve probably seen this in your list of add-ons:

While having 19 different Java Consoles installed isn’t a security or stability issue, seeing all those entries in the add-ons list can make your eyes bleed and make you want to slap Java developers for writing such sloppy code. To make things worse in Vista or Windows 7, there either won’t be an “uninstall” button on the extra consoles, or the box will be greyed out… in either case, you can’t uninstall them.

The problem exists because the Java extensions are installed in the Program Files folder, not the user’s profile folder (which makes sense in a way, as any Firefox user on a computer would want Java, right?). But the older extensions aren’t deleted when Java is updated, so you eventually end up with a list of them… like the screen cap above.

The fix is simple, if annoying.

Continue reading “Fix Multiple “Java Consoles” in Firefox”

Good news yesterday for Virgin Mobile customers with Samsung Intercept phones:

Virgin Mobile is owned by Sprint, and it seems that the company had several issues when it tried to update Sprint Intercept users to Froyo back in December. I guess being Sprint’s red-headed stepchild is good for VM users in a way: all the bugs that plagued Sprint users should be ironed out before VM rolls out the update this spring.