Category: Applications

Firefox wants to use the font… on OS X

Posted on March 31, 2010 by ellen

Ever since I spent some time adding and organizing some new fonts, Firefox has developed the annoying habit of showing repeated alerts that ask:

Firefox wants to use the font “__” on the volume _____”. This
font is not installed. Allow Firefox to use this font?

If I click “Don’t ask me again for Firefox,” it completely ignores it. Really, why do they even have that checkbox if it makes no difference!

This minor irritation became more critical today when it would not stop popping up those messages. Finally, I found the answer:

Open Firefox > Preferences, and click “Content“. Click the Advanced button as shown:

Speed up Mail.app

Posted on March 13, 2010 by ellen

Mail.app has been misbehaving lately on my iMac. It seems to be slowing down in general. I see way too much of the spinning beachball, so I’ve been trying all sorts of fixes, most of

“Camera communication error” on Canon PowerShot camera

Posted on February 22, 2010November 20, 2013 by ellen

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.

“Another meeting room running” meeting error in DimDim meetings

Posted on February 17, 2010 by ellen

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.

JQuery UI tabs causes IE7 to freeze

Posted on February 17, 2010 by ellen

I started hearing complaints that a particular learning module completed a few weeks ago was freezing up at random. It took a while to isolate the problem down to the use of JQuery UI tabs

Troubleshooting “No Service” messages on iPhone, part 2

Posted on February 14, 2010 by ellen

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.

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

Posted on February 7, 2010 by ellen

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.

Proposal: Advance Directives for our digital legacies

Posted on January 18, 2010 by ellen

Ten years from now, which is most likely to still be around, your last email or this one by some ancient Assyrian businessman?

Photo by mharrsch / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

One thing I can tell you is that when the photographer who took this image stops paying for their Flickr account, this photo is likely to disappear, and all sites that hotlinked to it using Flickr’s “embed” feature, will lose the use of it.

Copying text from a password protected PDF

Posted on December 25, 2009 by ellen

I was recently sent a document in PDF format for editing and revision. Unfortunately the author had protected the document from copying, pasting, annotation, page extraction – in short everything necessary to be able to

jQuery UI Accordion does not function in IE7/WinXP

Posted on December 9, 2009 by ellen

The Accordion is one of the handy interface widgets that can be generated using jQuery UI. There are several optional settings you can add into the function call, including animation, auto-height, etc. If you find it is not working on IE7try adding “animated:false” as one of the options.

If you are running a debugger on IE, and see the error “invalid option on line 486” this is definitely the problem.

Screen shot 2009-12-10 at 12.37.41 PM.jpg