I was recently installing Office 365 Pro Plus on a new PC when I unintentionally accepted a restart prompt from another program resulting in the computer restarting. After the computer booted back up I tried to restart the Office install, but it kept refusing saying that “Office can’t do that right now because your product is busy with another task. Please wait for this task to complete and try again.”
Lately I have had to preview a lot of JSON files. Apple’s QuickLook is a great feature for that, but, unfortunately, the base OS X doesn’t come with any QuickLook plugin for JSON. After a quick search online I found a free plugin that works fairly well. Not only does it preview the contents of the file, it pretty prints and supports folding. So, here is my shout-out to quick look JSON
There is also a website, quicklookplugins.com, dedicated to QuickLook plugins.
One of my projects involves changes to text files and quite often recycle of the application pool. Generally this means going the long way of opening the IIS Manager, going to the application pool node, right clicking on the app pool and selecting recycle, but there is a quicker way. You can create a shortcut in the quick launch area of the task bar that recycles a specific application pool.
I have been looking into switching my cellphone services providers from Sprint to Verizon because 1) Sprint has really slow data service in my area, and 2) Verizon has 4G LTE coverage. Anyways, as I started looking around for options I noticed that Amazon Wireless had pretty good prices for phones with 2-year contracts (who can beat $0.01 for Galaxy Nexus ?). I knew there had to be a catch, but I wasn’t able to find much about the differences online.
Image Resize for Windows is a handy utility for batch resizing images. I use that for batch resizing pictures, but the only thing about the resized pictures is that it puts “ (Custom)” or whatever size you specify in the filename. To rename the resized files you can use sed (if you have cygwin on Windows) to easily rename these files to what pattern you need. To do this a command like the following will do. This specific version will replace
find . -iname \*Custom\* | sed -e 's/\(.*\)\( (Custom)\)\(.*\)/mv "\0" "\1_small\3"/' | sh
Disclaimer: There are a gazillion ways to achieve this goal; this is just one of them.
I recently reinstalled OS X Lion on my MacBook Pro and one thing that I had forgotten about was the Control + Scroll gesture to zoom in to a specific part of the screen. This is especially important for me because I am running 1680×1050 on 15” screen (i.e. generally very small font). Finally after a few minutes of research I found out how to get that functionality back.
Here is what you need to do.
2013-03-17: I have duplicated Nick’s add-on and created a version that I am hoping I will update on a timely fashion as new songbird versions are released. You can find this add-on on the Songbird add-on website.
2012-11-04: Updated xpi for Songbird 2.1.
Apple Keyboard Media Key Support is a must have Songbird add-on if you use Songbird on a mac. With the recent Songbird update (1.10) it is no longer compatible and cannot be installed. I decided to update the compatibility in the install (xpi) and see if still works. Guess what? It does.
So, until Nick uploads the official version to the add-on site I am uploading an updated version here. I have emailed Nick so he can upload this to the official site. Note that I have updated the version to 1.4.1 (from 1.4.0) so Songbird will let you install it.
I have recently had to setup an Asterisk server. I decided to use Ubuntu because I wanted to utilize the server for a few other low priority things. As I was setting up the server I noticed that it complained about not finding a custom sound that I had recorded.
[Oct 27 00:22:05] WARNING[4136]: file.c:653 ast_openstream_full: File custom/TestWelcome does not exist in any format [Oct 27 00:22:05] WARNING[4136]: file.c:959 ast_streamfile: Unable to open custom/TestWelcome (format 0x4 (ulaw)): No such file or directory [Oct 27 00:22:05] WARNING[4136]: pbx.c:9579 pbx_builtin_background: ast_streamfile failed on SIP/xxxxxxxxxxxx for custom/TestWelcome
After some troubleshooting I found out that the Ubuntu packages configured Asterisk to look in /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/ instead of /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/ where the custom sound was being saved to. A quick fix for this is to create a sym link.
ln -s /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/custom
I think the correct way might be to edit astdatadir in /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf, but that’s something that I still need to research.
I recently bought the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The very first thing that I generally do with my devices is to check for any firmware/software updates. So, that’s what I did with the tablet… Settings > About > System Updates > Update…and to my surprise I got an error claiming “Wrong Password.” So, I went to the Samsung website and was able to login to my account there with the same password. I still reset my password and tried again with the same result. Afterwards, I tried a few different passwords and finally found one where I started getting another error “Processing failed.”
After some searching I found out that the tab connects to a service that has a separate account than the online account, and further searching revealed that I have to manually add the Samsung account before this will start working.
So, here is what you have to do.
Settings > Accounts & Sync > Add Account > Samsung account
Once you add the Samsung account through the above menu then go back and try updating. It should work now. Enjoy!
I am learning new things about vim all the time. Today’s revelation was the pipe symbol (|). I had to update a function call across multiple files, here is what I was doing.
vimgrep functionname ** to get the list of matching files.%s followed by w and cn, but given the large number of files this seemed very inefficient (I don’t want carpal tunnel syndrome!).So, a quick search revealed the pipe/bar (|). This lets you specify multiple commands at once. With this new knowledge, I replaced step 3 above with…
:%s | w | cn
…and now I can quickly review the call before doing the modification.