Category: Technology

Remove mouse-click sounds in Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter and Articulate

Posted on April 13, 2010 by ellen

Adobe Captivate, Articulate and Adobe Presenter can all add annoying clicking sounds or “pops” between slides when there is narration. These clicks often are associated with either picking up the actual mouse-click used to switch slides, are added in by the application by design, or added in as an audio artifact. The solutions vary depending on the application and cause.

Adobe Captivate: the clicks can be mouse-click sounds added by Captivate. To silence these generated mouse-click sounds, you may want to try this suggestion from the Paul Dewhurst’s “RaisingAimee” site. Replace the standard mouse-click sound with a silent sound file from Paul’s site:
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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

Annotate reality with the LiveScribe smartpen

Posted on February 15, 2010 by ellen

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.

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.

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

Posted on February 10, 2010 by ellen

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.

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.