Category: Applications

My favorite apps for taking notes and sense-making from PDF and Kindle

Posted on January 30, 2013December 3, 2013 by ellen

Most of what I read for work these days is in PDF or Kindle format, and there’s an awful lot of it. Trying to make sense out of the ever-faster firehose of information, most of it on subjects that are new to me, has forced me to rethink my research methods, or lack of them. I’ve never been able to take great notes by hand – I’m a much faster typist than hand-writer, and depend on being able to search within my notes, so I’ve mainly concentrated on electronic workflows.

Firefox not displaying XML file as a tree

Posted on January 26, 2013October 4, 2018 by ellen

I usually troubleshoot XML files by simply dragging them into a Firefox browser window. Unlike other text files, Firefox displays XML in a handy tree format, as show below.

Now everyone’s a “Maker”

Posted on January 13, 2013December 3, 2013 by ellen

My ship has come in, literally. Here is the SS Ellen: I just discovered Shapeways, an online 3D printing service that lets you build your own (somewhat random) spaceship in one of three colors, and

Guide to the 4 and 5 finger swipes on iPad

Posted on January 8, 2013 by ellen

Probably because I never read the manual, or perhaps because they were hidden in an update, I didn’t know about these iPad gestures till recently, but they are very handy, and I occasionally need a reminder as to what they are.

First, make sure Multitasking gestures are enabled in your iPad:

Word 2007, 2008: “Insert Section Break” commands grayed out after Endnotes

Posted on January 6, 2013 by ellen

If you are having trouble inserting a page or section break at the end of a Word document with Endnotes, you have two choices. You could either insert the new section BEFORE the Endnotes area, or change the Endnotes settings to display Endnotes at the end of each section .

Word considers the end of the document to be the one and only end, so nothing can come after it. It is easy to mistake the white space after the last Endnote for normal document space, but it is an “endnote-only” area.

IIS not recognizing .aspx extension (404 error)

Posted on December 12, 2012 by ellen

While trying to install a .NET application on a Windows Server 2003 box, I ran into a problem where the .aspx extension was not being recognized. Browsing .NET pages resulted in 404 (“page not found”) errors. Since the same set of application files had been installed on several other servers without incident, it seemed likely that there was something different about this server. The same version of .NET had been installed on all the servers, but never used.

I had assigned .NET 2.0.50727 to the application using the drop-down menu in the Application properties window in IIS Manager. But apparently, sometimes the .NET installer doesn’t register .NET to IIS, and it has to be done manually.

You can tell that this is the problem, if you have assigned .NET to the application, but when looking in IIS Manager > Web Service Extensions, it does not show up in the list.

The Usability of Windows 8

Posted on November 27, 2012December 3, 2013 by ellen

Just finished reading a fairly devastating review of Windows 8 by Jakob Nielsen. I have to wonder if some of the choices they made in designing the interface were forced because of patent considerations, considering all the air has been sucked out of the room in that regard by Apple.

Worth a read, if you are wondering what to expect of a tablet interface that has been shoehorned onto a PC. Perhaps it will make more sense if they start selling 70″ touch screen high-performance tablet PCs. We’ll all work standing up next to the wall or something, waving our arms. It will be better for our figures, at least.

How to delete a few Time Machine backups, safely

Posted on June 20, 2012 by ellenm1

Sometimes for whatever reason, Time Machine doesn’t auto-delete backups to make space for new ones. If you have this problem you might try getting it going again by manually deleting one or two of the oldest ones. Here’s how to safely do this, using the Time Machine interface.

Enter Time Machine and select the backup you want to delete.

Update on exporting highlights from your Kindle

Posted on April 16, 2012December 3, 2013 by ellen

There have been a few interface updates to Amazon’s Kindle page since I last wrote about it, but there remains a strange lack of comprehension on the part of Amazon, that people might actually want to use their highlights. There is still no obvious way to export the data.

For those with Macs, I’ve come up with a workaround, and perhaps there is something similar on the PC side.

Help for Safari crashing on older iPads

Posted on January 7, 2012 by ellen

Lately it seems that apps tend to crash a lot on my first-generation iPad. Safari is one of the biggest offenders, and it appears the problem is at least partly from lack of free memory. If Safari starts crashing everytime you open it, it sometimes helps to close all apps in the multitasking bar.