carbonel | Entries tagged with techie techie upharsin

1. On Windows 7, in the Windows Explorer (not to be confused with Internet Explorer), I have a bunch of folders in the Favorites section. This, as it says, gives quick access to the most-used folders. A couple of days ago, the version of my Downloads folder in the Favorites section started acting as if the only contents of said folder were music: it displays Name, Track #, Title, Album, etc. -- but not file size, date of file, or the other things I actually want to see. There are some MP3 files in this folder, but mostly it's other stuff.

The "actual" folder (c:\users\[realname]\downloads) is displaying the files properly. I tried the obvious step of deleting the Downloads folder from my Favorites, then adding it back in again. This failed to fix the problem. It was fine until just a few days ago, but I have no idea what I did to change it, and Google is failing me. Any idea how to get it back?

2. There is some university that every year does a reality check for faculty: the new students have never encountered a world without cell phones or the Internet or whatever changed about 18 years ago. I think it's an annual list. Where can I find this?

3. There is an SF (or fantasy, depending on how you define such things) story that claims that any group of people falls silent at 20 after the hour. The narrator theorizes that people are listening for something, and the final line of the story (without major spoilers) has the listeners being rewarded. I believe I read this in an SF anthology, but I can't remember which one. I'll post to

whatwasthatbook if no one has it handy, but I suspect this is one of the queries that someone reading this may know offhand.

Yesterday it was working fine. Today, all it says is "HELLO." The remote is working -- did you know you can check the remote with your camera phone? -- but the player just sits there. The eject button ejects the disk, but it won't suck it back in again.

The good news is that apparently Panasonic takes its one-year warranties seriously. I called tech support because I was hoping there was some magic reset key combination (there is, but it didn't work for me), and after almost an hour of trying everything suggested, I have a case number and an address to sent it to. Only after they receive my proof of purchase, but luckily, I still have that.

My DVD players seem to be in a downward spiral. I don't remember the timing, but each one I owned has lasted less time. Each one also cost less, though this one is actually a Blu-ray player, so it cost rather more than the DVD player it replaced.

No real message here, just kvetching at the perfidy of mechanical objects. I'd intended to watch the last few episodes of Season 3 of Justified tonight, but instead I'll watch more of The Closer on my Roku. So far that's still working properly.

After way too much procrastination, I'm finally using the new computer (with Windows 7 and Office 10) full-time. While I haven't used my Palm Treo for a few years, I had been using the Palm (via Access) Desktop Manager for my contact list. The program is very convenient, but it doesn't connect to anything anymore. It is possible to do an export, and I probably will, but that's not my current problem. And it would be really stupid to hunt down a copy of the Palm software just to manage contacts on the new computer.

I want a long-term solution, and I almost have one. Outlook has a perfectly good contact manager, and my understanding is that it synchs with iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). (It does, right?) But I'm not sure how to set up an account in Outlook that's for me. I also have an account in Outlook that's for work, and that one uses Exchange. I don't want to touch that account, or do anything that might break it. It took a fair amount of work to get it working the way it needed to be, and I'm not sure it could be managed again.

What I want is a separate, non-Exchange, Outlook account for me personally, that I can use for both contacts and calendar. I've looked online for instructions on how to do this, and pretty much failed, though I've learned a lot about sharing other stuff on Outlook. What complicates things is that I don't want to use Outlook for e-mail, just for contacts and calendar. At this point, at least. And the one time I tried to set up a new Outlook account, the first thing it asked about was all the e-mail stuff.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I keep thinking this should be simple.

This is, of course, an entirely hypothetical question. But supposing, hypothetically, that there were this movie that I knew a friend wanted. And that this movie had once had a DVD release, but was now comprehensively out of print, so that the few copies for sale were in the hundreds of dollars range. Except that Netflix had this movie available to lend. And I had a Netflix subscription and the friend didn't.

Assuming these things, and assuming that Netflix actually came through with the movie rather than saying "oops! not available after all," and assuming that the movie had whatever copy protection was standard several years ago, how would I go about making a copy for my friend? Would it be possible to copy the entire disk? Or would I be more likely to find the means to export just the movie itself as an .mp4 or .avi file?

Totally hypothetically, but non-hypothetical thanks are offered for answers.

ETA: Ideally, such hypothetical copying/ripping/conversion/whatever would be done on a Windows computer.

Do other people still use them? The people who are using computer mice, I mean. The one I have could probably use replacing, and I realized that since current generation of computer mice don't use trackballs, I might not need one. So I tried mousing without it, and it worked just fine, but was noisy and tactilely scrapy in a way I didn't really like.

I'm back to using the old mousepad, after having cleaned off the bottom, and it feels better. But I'm curious just how old-fogey this makes me -- allowing for the fact that having my main computer be a desktop computer is already over to the fogey-brigade side of things.

I am very much not a Mac person, but my mother (who is) is asking for help. I know how to do most of what she needs, but the step that I'm stumbling on is finding the actual book files that are downloaded by the Kindle for Mac application. The books have actually been downloaded, so they need to be around *somewhere*. But searching on *.azw doesn't find them. One website says they should be in a "My Kindle documents" directory, but I can't find any such thing in her Finder.

I suspect this is because the Mac protects the user from anything so crass as actual files. But can anyone help me help my mother without my having to wait until I get back to my own computer?

Ironically, it appears the only way to get a previous version of Stanza into my iPhone 3 (iOS 4.3) is to jailbreak it. Even though Stanza is, and always has been, free.

The instructions I've found online appear to be quite straightforward, but that sort of thing is always fraught. Has anyone actually tried it? Any gotchas I should be aware of? Is there any reason to un-jailbreak it if I manage to get Stanza back?

I do have my iPhone backed up. In fact, I already had to restore my contacts from backup after synching in the wrong direction and wiping them out completely. But I now have an off-iPhone copy of all my contacts, which makes me happy. I have not, alas, been able to do the same with my calendar, because the only desktop calendar apps I've been able to find that promise to sync with the iPhone are around $50. But that's more of interest for historical purposes -- I've saved the things I have for the next couple of months.

I have an iPhone 3. It's running iOS 4.2.1. When I tried to update it to iOS 5 several months ago, I got an error message saying that iOS 5 isn't compatible with this model of iPhone. Okay, I can live with that.

But yesterday, I did something stupid. I had been refraining from updating apps on my iPhone because I was afraid the newer versions of apps wouldn't work on the older OS. Then I tried to install the brand-new Living Social app, and got an error message saying that I needed at least iOS 4.3. Okay, I said to myself, these apps are smart enough to know whether they're compatible or not, so I can update things after all.

And after I did that, Stanza (my e-book reader of choice) didn't work anymore. When I select it, it appears to open, but then it bounces back to the main screen. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it, and that didn't help. I have to assume that the later version isn't compatible with my iPhone.

So -- is there some way to install an earlier version of an iPhone app? Or is only the latest and greatest (which seems to be incompatible with my iPhone 3) available out there in the cloud?

And approach two: While

erikvolson provided the good news that Stanza still works in iOS 6, I do realize that its days are numbered, and I need to prepare for the evil day. The thing I like the most about Stanza is that I can control the way paragraphs appear -- I want them to be ragged right, no space between paragraphs, and indented. With Stanza, I can do that in the formatting options. It occurs to me, however, that ePub documents are editable. I've fiddled a bit with Sigil, which is a free ePub editor, but I don't really have a handle on how to do anything other than minor text editing. I suspect what I want is a basic style sheet that says plain text appears this way and not that way. Because I have certainly seen e-books with the kind of formatting I want, even if BlueNote and iBooks don't display that way by default.

1. Is this a reasonable approach?

2. Is there someone who would be willing to walk me through things, point me to a tutorial, or knock up a style sheet for me? I'm familar with them from Word (even if

dd_b insist that they aren't real style sheets), but my HTML skills are pretty rudimentary -- and my CSS skills are nonexistent.

Help or advice appreciated.

My desktop computer claims to have 100 Mbps Internet connectivity, but is refusing to connect to the Internet. No browser, no Eudora, not even Dropbox can connect.

But wireless is working, which is why I was able to check my LJ friends list and (proof positive) post this.

It happened after I rebooted my computer, but that shouldn't have done anything. I tried unplugging and replugging the DSL router. I even tried throttling the Internet connectivity to 10 Mbps half duplux, a trick recommended by tech support to coddle dying routers. All without any result.

I suppose some sort of virus might cause this, but I'm running McAfee Total Protection, and it damned well shouldn't let anything like that through.

Any idea what could have caused this?

ETA: It's working again. What seems to have fixed things was either moving the Ethernet cable to a different port or unplugging the computer and restarting it. Or both.

I'd been meaning to back up the external hard drive that all my music is on -- all the CDs I ripped, all the LPs and tapes that I'd converted myself, everything. I finally got a large enough additional hard drive to put it on. And now my music hard drive, the one that hasn't been backed up, seems to have totally died. The light goes on, but there are no vibrations.

Is there anything that can be done that won't be hideously expensive?

Current Mood: distressed

Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. I'm on a mailing list for Ben's Outlet (all

guppiecat's fault), which is a tech-deal-of-the-day sort of thing. Most of the items are either "yes, I want that and can use it" or "no, have no use." (The $3 international power converter was a great buy.) But every so often there comes along an item that is sufficiently nifty and inexpensive that I have an immediate yearning for it, despite having no real use for it.

Such an item is today's deal, which is a 150-watt DC to AC power inverter for $13. My immediate reaction is "Must have!" and "It's so affordable!" even though my need for pluggable gadgets in the car is strictly limited. The only thing I can see it currently being useful for is to act as an iPhone/iPad charger -- and that would probably be better served by getting a device-specific DC charger.

The only way I've had any success at all in shutting up the "Want this!" part of the brain is by bringing in the decluttering argument. I haven't done all that well at getting rid of stuff, but I've been able, to some extent, to put the brakes on bringing in new stuff. Even though this would live in the car, where there is room.

Can anyone suggest any reasonable reason as to why I should own this item?

Current Mood: thoughtful

1. I have about 500 photos from my Africa trip. Is there any place to upload them that's 1) free (for that number of photos), and 2) makes it easy to link to so I can use it as a source for doing LJ posts with embedded photos? I kept a trip journal, and I'd like to post it with photos.

2. I have this DVD player that I'm mostly very happy with, except that it's overeager. If I'm on a screen, after 20 seconds or so it will automagically press whatever "button" the cursor is sitting on. Which means that if I'm perusing a bunch of options, all of a sudden it's chosen one for me, and I have to back out again. I've looked through the documentation and haven't found anything that appears relevant, but I assume it's an option that I wish to opt out of. The player is an Orei DVD-Z1H 1080p HDMI Multi Zone Region player, if that means anything to anyone.

Any help appreciated.

This would be an AKICOLJ post, except that I'm not sure there's anything to be done. It might just be grumbling. But I'd appreciate advice.

I rearranged some HDMI cords connected to my TV because I got an HDMI switcher to deal with the fact that I have three HDMI devices but only two HDMI inputs. When I went to turn the TV back on, it wouldn't. The orange Vizio light in front is still lit, but the light doesn't turn white to show that it's awake. I called Vizio tech support, who walked me through a TV's equivalent of a reboot (unplug, then push in the on switch for 30 seconds, then replug in), with no luck. (Anyone have any other suggestions? Is it worth taking to a repair shop?)

This happened once before, but that time, after a certain amount of pressing buttons, it woke up. This time, nada.

The TV is more than two years old, so it's out of warranty. (I can't remember when I bought it, but I'm sure I've had it more than two years.) And another aggravation -- the LJ archive software that I'd been using seems to have broken, or at least choked on some existing content, so I can't check exactly when.

So since I couldn't access MLB.tv on the television, I decided to listen to the Cubs opener on the Internet version of WGN, which I pay for. The screen opens properly, and acknowledges that I'm entitled to listen, but no voice is heard. It just sits there. Maybe if I reboot the computer it'll help. When I have time.

Grrr.

Current Mood: aggravated

I had someone coming over tonight to watch the third episode of Sherlock with me, and since I'd had to burn the second episode to a DVD rather than a CD, I thought I'd see if my DVD player could cope with rewritable DVDs, if I burned the additional episode to it.

Except that the DVD player (where the disk was) wouldn't open. And nothing displayed on the screen. The "on" light was on, and when I hit the eject button, it went into a blinky mode, but that's all. Since I paid all of $60 or so for the player in the first place at least five years ago, I don't suppose it owes me anything, but it's annoying. Especially since my computer's DVD burner appears to have become fractious at the pretty much the same time. (It deals with DVDs okay, but it refuses to recognize or burn CDs.)

Any recommendations for a new DVD player? It needs to be region-free (or hackable to be so), and play .avi files. It would be nice if it played .mp4 and .mkv files also. And I'd really, really like it to be able to play those from a USB thumb drive, so I don't have to burn disposable DVDs and CDs for things I'm only going to watch once.

I'm open to arguments that I should be purchasing a Blu-Ray player, though my current inclination is to not bother.

And if anyone knows of any deals for external USB DVD burners, I'd appreciate information on that as well.

I filed a police report online. Total new replacement cost for everything plus damage repair was just under $1,000; otherwise, I would have had to do it in person.

The car window is repaired. $300 out of pocket. It's a 10-year-old car, so I didn't have comprehensive coverage. The car dealership recommended a general collision place, but they were closed on January 2 and didn't make house calls in any case, so I found an auto glass specialist on Angie's List that did.

Garmin will transfer my lifetime update coverage to a different unit for free, once I buy a new one. (They required a case number for the police report, which I sent.)

I put in a bid for a used iPod on eBay, and if I don't get that (which I don't really expect to; my bid is on the low side), I'll probably buy one of the used ones listed on Amazon.

No current ideas about replacing headphones; I want something comfortable and not too expensive. The Bang & Olufson ones I lost had over-the-ear pieces that kept them in place, which meant I could wear them for hours without them ever hurting. But I never would have paid that kind of price for earphones on my own -- they were a gift from my father -- especially since most of what I listen to is audiobooks. On the other hand, the B&O ones are almost the same price now as what my father paid for them ten years ago or so (I accidentally saw the receipt), which makes them less expensive in absolute terms. Recommendations appreciated here.

Oh, frabjous day! Stanza was updated for iOS5 after all! After the OS update, it kept crashing back to the main screen, but after I deleted it and reinstalled it, it was back to its old self, albeit minus all my settings and books. I'm not sure who I would send a thank-you note to, but I feel I should. Especially since there's a note in Wikipedia that this is really, for sure, the last update; I'd like to change that, if possible.

On the other hand, the update to iOS5 was not entirely successful. I got an error message when the upgrade was done, then it tried to restore from backup twice, and I got another error message. I finally just started up the iPad, and all my purchased and installed apps seem to be there, but it seemed to be treating the iPad as a new setup, though it new my e-mail address.

I have no idea how to reconcile it with my desktop computer. I think what's needed at this point is to tell the desktop that the iPad is the canonical device, and the creation of the new restore data should come from there. But I'm not sure. At this point, I'm nervous about plugging it in to the desktop computer, because it took several hours to get where we (me and my iPad, that is) are now.

I haven't actually upgraded my iPad or iPhone to iOS 5 yet, but it seems pretty comprensively acknowledged that a) the new version of the OS breaks Stanza, and b) Amazon, which owns Stanza, has no intention of fixing it.

Stanza has been my ebook reader of choice since I discovered that I couldn't import .mobi files into the Kindle reader. Amazon fixed that with a subsequent upgrade, but I discovered that I preferred the customizability of Stanza. It's superior to both the Kindle Reader and iBooks in ability to change fonts, spacing between paragraphs, justification, and a number of other features.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a replacement ebook reader? I can cope with iBooks if I have to, but I'd really prefer something better if it's out there, even if it costs money.

Current Mood: annoyed

I installed McAfee Total Protection yesterday. Today, I fired up BitTornado, my BitTorrent client of choice. Apparently the firewall has blocked everything torrent-related, because all it does it show the "Starting up..." message and nothing else. After a long time, it showed a message in red that said "ERROR -- Couldn't listen - unable to forward port via UPnP."

I assume it's the settings in McAfee that are causing the problem. I went into the firewall section and added BitTornado to the list of programs that are allowed access to the Internet. But I assume there's some magical port-related thing that needs to be fixed as well. I'd really rather not turn the firewall off altogether, since I think having it is a generally fine idea. But assuming I'm not breaking things by torrenting (and assuming the files I'm torrenting are clean), what do I need to do to make a torrent-sized hole in the firewall?

Help?

ETA: I turned off the firewall temporarily, and started up BitTornado again. Same result. So it's not simply the firewall. But it has to be something in the protection suite.

ETA later: Fixed. Disabling UPnP forwarding in BitTornado solved the problem.

Current Mood: relieved

Thanks to Greg Cotton, I now have two more holes in the floor, and the Internet goes from the office to the living room, where the television is. (At least, I think it does. I haven't actually done anything that would test this hypothesis.)

Which means that I'd like to be able to take advantage of the new capabilities. The two devices I know about are AppleTV and Roku, but I expect there are others. I'm looking for information and recommendations.

What I know I'd like to be able to do is watch Netflix and possibly Amazon content -- I have a Netflix subscription.

The other possible issue is that whatever device I have, I'd prefer it not plug directly into the TV, if possible. I have a DVR from DirecTV, and I'd much rather go through that. I think the TV does have an additional HDMI plugin, but I don't want to have to mess with that kind of switching. I already have to do unnatural things to get to the DVD player.

Advice? Suggestions?

(What I really need is a "dealing with technology" icon; the TiVo one is anachronistic, since I had to give up my TiVo a few years ago.)