Speed up Mail.app
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
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“Camera communication error” on Canon PowerShot camera
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
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 readingJQuery UI tabs causes IE7 to freeze
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
Continue readingAnnotate reality with the LiveScribe smartpen
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 readingTroubleshooting “No Service” messages on iPhone, part 2
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 readingConfluence: Remove page icons from old-school PageTree macro
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”
Check out this little elephant whipping the water around!
Baby Elephant’s First Swim! from Zoos Victoria on Vimeo.
Continue readingSometimes masking tape is all you need: Brother Laser Printer cartridges
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 readingIE 7 & 8: Navigation to the webpage was cancelled, revisited
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.
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