Category: Internet & Technology

David Caulton over at Zunester (I site I often link to off Zune Thoughts) has put together a retro mish-mash of computer ads from circa 1989/1990. It’s amazing how far things have come in the past 15 years. Paying $2398 USD for a 33 mhz computer with 1 MB of RAM? Been there done that – when I was 18 years old, rather than get a loan to buy a used car like many of my friends, I took out a $3000 bank loan to buy a computer. Yeah, I was a geek. I’ll have to see if I can dig up the specs for that first machine…

Statistically, I didn’t think this was possible. First I get the defective Shuttle SD39P2 sent to me, then the video card I ordered wouldn’t fit in said Shuttle, and when I tried it in my full-sized PC it turned out to be defective. A new SD39P2 arrived last week, so last night I sat down to put it all together – I breathed a sigh of relief when it actually booted! So imagine the frustration I felt when the Vista installation went screwy – it would get to the stage when it copied files over and expanded them, but at the expansion stage it would stick at 0% and the optical drive (a Plextor 760A) would make these rapid-fire seeking sounds. I tried four times, and it never worked. I swapped in a cheap NEC DVD burned I picked up to keep as a spare burned, and it worked like a charm. So for those keeping score this ONE project of mine has had THREE defective parts. What are the odds? Am I cursed, or have quality control standards slipped badly on PC hardware?

On the plus side, the new Shuttle SD39P2 screams with the Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme in it. It’s so fast it hurts. But it’s a good hurt. I’ll be writing an article on this rig for Digital Media Thoughts, so watch for it.

Another one-hit-wonder just for the search engines and people who happen to have the same problem as I did.

Somehow I’d managed to turn on “reveal codes” or “show paragraph marks” or whatever it’s called in Outlook 2007 (it’s hard to describe a feature that you turned on accidentally, but see the image above). Word calls it “Show Hide P” (“P” being the backwards “P” paragraph symbol that I can’t copy/paste from anything, nor can I find it in the symbols font), and it can be toggled off/on by using CNTRL+*….at least that’s what Word 2007 says, yet that keyboard shortcut didn’t work for me in Outlook 2007.

I couldn’t figure out how to turn this feature off – I’d searched online, the bundled help, and every single menu and options screen I could possibly think of. I should add that I toggled it off/on Word 2007 but that has no impact in Outlook 2007, so the two settings aren’t linked.

I was pulling out my hair, but Sue Mosher (who’s been an MVP for even longer than I have I think) responded to my posting in the Outlook newsgroup with this single line:

Try Ctrl+Shift+8 (which is what Ctrl+* really means).

And that did it. I really have no idea why Ctrl+* doesn’t really mean press the control key and the asterisk key (*) at the same time, but the solution works.

This is a great story – it shows that you can’t always believe the people who are the “experts” because they will usually have their own interests at heart instead of yours. I feel the same way about dentists, lawyers, and pretty much all other professionals. 😉

Thanks to Todd for the link.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the day after I publish this rant, HP goes and releases the Vista drivers for the 2600n (thanks to everyone that told me about it). I never knew I had that much juice, to get a response in 24 hours! 😉 They didn’t release network-ready drivers though, so you need to do a little fiddling to get them to work. Here’s the basic steps:

1. Download the  HP Color LaserJet 2600n Print Driver Package
2. Run the installer and it will put the drivers into a folder located here: C:\Program Files\ Hewlett-Packard\ LaserJet 2600 Drivers
3. Make sure your 2600n is turned on and connected to your network
4. Go into the admin tool for your router and figure out which IP address the printer is using. It will usually be listed under something like “Device Status” or something similar. Copy the IP address to your clipboard
5. Go into Control Panel > Printers in Vista
6. Click on ADD A PRINTER
7. Click on ADD A NETWORK, WIRELESS OR BLUETOOTH PRINTER
8. It will scan but you can click THE PRINTER I WANT ISN’T LISTED
9. On the next screen, select ADD A PRINTER USING A TCP/IP ADDRESS OR HOSTNAME
10. Click NEXT, then on the next screen, select the DEVICE TYPE as TCP/IP DEVICE
11. Paste the IP address you got from your router into the HOSTNAME OR IP ADDRESS line
12. Leave PORT NAME blank, leave the “QUERY THE PRINTER…” box checked, and click next
13. From here on I’m going from memory: it will eventually prompt you for a driver, and you’ll click on HAVE DISK and browse to that C:\Program Files\ folder and it will show you only one file to select
14. The install of the driver will happen, and you’ll finally be able to print!

The network management tools are still missing, so you can’t easily find out how much ink the printer has and whatnot, but at least you can print!

I suppose I should have known better than to use a first-generation effort from Microsoft to read RSS feeds, but I honestly thought they’d get something this simple right. They didn’t. The basis functionality is there, but it’s missing pretty much every feature you’d want if you had to process a lot of RSS feeds each day. There’s no way to have all the items marked as read when you switch to a different feed (who wants to right click > Mark All As Read). There’s no way to have headline-only items automatically fetch the Web page. And worst of all, duplicates run rampant:

Why the duplicates? I believe it’s because I’m on an Exchange server. I open Outlook 2007 up on my main PC, it downloads all the RSS feeds. I then grab my laptop and open up Outlook 2007 on it – and it seems to re-download all the RSS feeds again, resulting in massive duplication. Because this is an Exchange issue, you’d think Microsoft testers would have seen it happen internally and fixed it, no? Seems not.
Ultimately I think I’m just going to have to head back to Feeddemon. For all its foibles, at least there wasn’t a problem with duplicates.

I couldn’t help but get a chuckle out of this: I posted the entry about the It’s Rule and then today I was typing and look what the Word Grammar checker (manifested inside Outlook 2007) told me to to:

It’s wrong in suggesting that I not use “it’s” since I am saying “…the next email I get it is fixed again.” In retrospect I probably should have had a comma after “get”, but I doubt that would have changed the flag.

Well, it’s about a year too late, but Microsoft has finally admitted that Firefox is a serious browser player in the market and if they want to claim that a majority of the Web can access Windows Media content, they have to have a real Windows Media Player plug-in for it. Now here it is. I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume it will be just as seamless as the way WMP works with IE today. [Source]

I’m completely baffled. I thought that the screwy keyboard character issue was restricted just to Firefox, but this morning I saw the same problem with Outlook 2007 when I tried to type a question mark I’d get an “ѐ” character. The same problem cropped up in Firefox, but in a Windows Live Messenger chat window I had no problem getting a question mark? I’m officially getting ticked off at this problem…what kind of a problem would effect keyboard input on a per-application basis rather than system wide? Restarting Outlook fixed the problem, but that doesn’t help me narrow down what’s causing it.

It’s always ticked me off the way Microsoft Office requires the install CD to do any number of seemingly minor things. Today though I was surprised to see an all new “feature”: I was working on a laptop that had Outlook 2003 installed, and I had signed up the owner for a hosted Exchange account and wanted to install Outlook 2007. Sure, I could install over top, but why not do an uninstall and keep things clean? I tried to uninstall Outlook 2003, but it wouldn’t uninstall without the Office 2003 install CD. What kind of lunacy is this? You should *never* need an install CD to remove a program – that’s idiotic on every level possible.