Month: February 2010

“Camera communication error” on Canon PowerShot camera

Posted on by

I carry a little Canon PowerShot SD 990 camera everywhere. After all, you never know when you’ll see something worthy of memorializing. But a consequence of my “shoot now, ask questions later” attitude is that memory cards fill up very fast!

A while back, I decided to handle the problem once and for all, and got a 32GB SD card. Most of the time only about 8 GB of it is really full, but sometimes if I shoot a lot of video clips, it can get higher.

This has caused several issues. iPhoto began crashing on trying to display the new images when I connected the camera directly. Switching to a card reader, the iMac (running Leopard) still had trouble sometimes mounting the SD card on the desktop. There were so many files in one folder, I was nearing some kind of ultimate limit for the OS.

Continue reading

“Another meeting room running” meeting error in DimDim meetings

Posted on by

I’ve been using DimDim lately to share screens and host impromptu meetings. I recently hosted a three-person meeting for the purpose of screensharing an application we were all working on. Previous meetings of this type had gone well, but this time we kept having problems with “Another meeting room running” errors which prevented screensharing.

Continue reading

Annotate reality with the LiveScribe smartpen

Posted on by

Screen shot 2010-02-15 at 5.20.08 PM.jpg

When I first heard of the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen, I wondered:

“OK, it’s a pen that records a lecture. I already carry with me two or three devices that can record audio and video. Why would I want another ?

After trying it out, I can tell you why you might want this. It is a lot more than a recording device. When the Pulse smartpen records audio, it syncs that recording to whatever you are writing or drawing at the time. Then it OCR’s your notes (even if your handwriting is terrible!), and makes them searchable. You can search the lecture for keywords based on your notes. Then copy and paste the text of your notes into other applications.

Continue reading

Troubleshooting “No Service” messages on iPhone, part 2

Posted on by

There has been so much interest recently in my post on the No Service error message that appears to be plaguing particularly 3G iPhones, that it seemed appropriate to put up a more detailed summary of possible fixes for the “No Service” message on the iPhone.

Below is a summary of all the suggestions from the many comments on the original post (thanks to all the commenters!) and from several sites around the web.

Continue reading

Confluence: Remove page icons from old-school PageTree macro

Posted on by

The pagetree plugin for Confluence is a commonly used navigation widget for the popular wiki. There are now 2 versions: the older “pagetree” and the newer “pagetree2” which has several improvements, including a less cluttered look. The older version displays the standard Confluence page icons next to each node of the tree, whereas these can be hidden (and usually are) in the newer version.

Old-style “pagetree”                              New-style “pagetree2”

Picture 32.jpgPicture 33.jpg

Continue reading

Sometimes masking tape is all you need: Brother Laser Printer cartridges

Posted on by

I have an old Brother HL-5250DN Laser Printer that’s been giving good service for years. Seems like forever since I replaced the toner cartridge (TN350 Black Toner Cartridge). But the other day, it simply stopped printing! It was out of toner, apparently. There must have been a “toner low” message, but I missed it.

Unfortunately it is quite unforgiving. Once it is below a certain point it simply stops functioning. Of course it was a most inconvenient moment for it to stop working.

All I could do was go look at Amazon for a new cartridge. Lo and behold, the customer reviewers there have come up with a quick fix to get the printer back up and running while you are waiting for the new cartridge to arrive.

Continue reading

IE 7 & 8: Navigation to the webpage was cancelled, revisited

Posted on by

If you get the error “Navigation to the webpage was cancelled” while browsing, chances are a security setting needs to be corrected. In a previous post, I suggested a “scorched earth” settings-reset procedure, but I’ve found that that isn’t always sufficient. Sometimes the settings need to be relaxed beyond factory defaults.

For instance, our Learning Management System (LMS) uses mixed https and http content, and Internet Explorer is often set to block mixed content entirely. Sometimes it will prompt the user but often it will simply give the error “Navigation to the webpage was cancelled.” In the case of our LMS, a large clue to what is going on is that the login page appears completely unstyled, because the style sheets and images are part of the blocked content. 

Continue reading

Pass data to a Qualtrics survey and display it in the survey and reports

Posted on by

Qualtrics is an online survey application with many capabilities that aren’t obvious at first glance. I’m currently using Qualtrics to create a feedback form that will be used in several hundred learning modules. This form needs to recognize from which learning module it’s being accessed, and it should determine the author of the module and email them a copy of the user’s feedback.

Qualtrics has a feature called “embedded data” which allows you to pass any arbitrary arguments in the link to the survey. We’ll use this to add metadata to the feedback.

There are three steps:

  1. Set up a link to the survey that passes “Embedded Data” values
  2. Set up the survey to access the Embedded Data
  3. Do something with the Embedded Data
Continue reading