Gdgtry

This post applies to both Windows 7 and Windows XP (and probably the server OS’s as well).

At the office we have two available networks: An internal network with our servers that also has filtered internet and an external wifi network that just offers unfiltered internet.

The main issue is that, as an IT tech, I download a lot of large files that can slow down our network, so I often found myself using a laptop on our external wifi downloading items so that I don’t slow internal people down.

My goal was to have two network connections on my Windows 7 PC, one wired internal connection and one a wifi external connection. I also want my internet traffic to go over my wifi connection but at the same time any have the ability to access all the internal sources.

A warning before I start: Doing this incorrectly can open a giant security hole in your network, please don’t do it without the approval of your IT dept.

First, I simply hooked up both network connections and tested them both (by only plugging one in at a time and checking the internet) as fully functional.

Once both are functional you need to edit your routing table so the correct requests go over the correct network adapter.

You can do this via the command line, but I found the Nirsoft NetRouteView utility to make this whole process a whole bunch easier.

Download and extract the NetRouteView utility. Then if on Windows 7, right click the NetRouteView.exe file and select “Run as Administrator”.

NetRouteView with two connections

Click the “Interface Name” column title to sort your entries by interface like above.

Depending on your network only one or two changes should be made. First, you need to remove the 0.0.0.0 entry from your internal network. That entry is a “catch all”. We want the catch all on the outside network and not the inside. So remove 0.0.0.0 from your internal adapter and make sure its already there on your external connection.

For most people that should be it! But for me I had to add one entry to my internal network to get it to work. I wanted the whole 192.0.0.0 (that means anything that has a 192 for its first number in it’s IP address) to go on my internal network connection. So I added the following:

Adding a route

Thats it! To check that everything is going over the correct interface I added the Network Traffic gadget to my Windows 7 desktop twice (just drag it to the desktop twice from the gadget list). I made my internal connection red and my external connection green.

Network Traffic with two connections

Now I can watch as I view a web page which adapter it’s going out.

Recently we upgraded our Windows 7 machines to Adobe Acrobat X Standard/Pro. Some of our users were having issues with random PDFs that would not print.

When attempting to print these PDFs users would get a “The Document could not be printed.” pop-up followed by “The Document could not be printed.”

Interestingly I found that in most cases the issue occurred when the PDF was being viewed embedded in Internet Explorer. In some cases If I saved the offending PDF to desktop and then opened it, it would print without issue.

The solution I’ve come across was to replace the drivers of our HP 1320 printers from the PCL 6 drivers to the HP universal drivers. For us, that resolved all printing problems.

I’ve read on the Adobe forums that the issue is related to gibberish hidden characters added when someone adds text to a PDF from something other than an Adobe product. Something like Microsoft Word.

I’d be interested if anyone could come up with a “true” fix, as my solution sounds sort of like a work around.

We currently have five of these scanners deployed on Windows 7 machines. All installations were experiencing a random error of “PDF file creation failed.”

PDF file creation failed.

The error did not not usually occur if only a single document was scanned and saved. However, If two documents are scanned and saved back to back, this error was likely to occur at the start of the second document. Internet searches yielded nothing, but after contacting Fujitsu support, we came to a solution.

The error stems from the fact that ScanSnap Manager defaults to saving scans into the My Pictures folder. At our offices all users have their My Documents folders redirected via Group Policy to a network share. Apparently ScanSnap is sensitive to any delay when it attempts to write the scanned PDF files to disk.

The solution is to change the scan path to something other than a network share.

The steps:

Right click the ScanSnap icon and select the Scan Button Settings… option.

Select Scan Button Settings

Then, if necessary, expand the window to show all the options for each setting. Then go to the Save tab and change the Image Saving folder to something other than a network share.

Change the Image Saving folder location.

That quickly resolved the errors we were receiving.

The default behavior in Safari has always been that, while typing a URL, enter selects the most likely recommendation. Its super efficient. Why it’s not the default of all browsers, I’ll never know. FireFox before version 4 had the ability to auto-complete address bar suggestions. In about:config the option was called browser.urlbar.autoFill. With Version 4, that option no longer functions. As usual an extension has come to the rescue!

The "Enter Selects" FireFox Add-On

The enter selects add-on doesn’t truly auto-fill the remainder of the the URL bar. Instead it simply selects the first suggested awesomebar result for whatever you’ve typed. The end result is the same. A quick “g, enter” gets me to Google, “l, enter” gets me to lifehacker, “j, enter” gets me to Jalopnik. I know I could have set up some tags on my bookmark entries, but this is a much more effective method that changes over time as the sites I visit change.

Another entry goes on my FireFox must have extension list.

This post is now outdated, please see the update available here:

http://gdgtry.com/2011/01/thinning-down-firefox-4s-tab-bar-2/

My previous post about modifying FireFox 4′s tab bar layout has been one of the more popular posts on my blog. After updating to FF4 Beta 6 the modification broke, but I’ve found a solution:

#navigator-toolbox[tabsontop="true"] #TabsToolbar{
padding-left: 80px !important;
padding-right: 102px !important;
padding-top: 2px !important;
margin-top: -25px !important;
}

#appmenu-button{
padding: 3px 5px 3px 5px !important;
height: 20px !important;
}

As you can see, the only change is we tell the tab bar to move up 25 pixels from where it was. We also ditch the tab position as fixed as it’s not really necessary.

FireFox 4 with a better tab layout

This gets us back to our old style. I haven’t had time to test all the edge cases to see if it messes anything up, but it should get your normal browsing bar back to an acceptable size.

Alternate title: How to creepily stalk people using their pictures.

Since I’ve gotten an iPhone 4 I’ve stopped carrying a normal camera with me on outings. I find the iPhone’s camera more than sufficient for most of my photo needs. Many other people are also doing the same. The fun thing about most camera phones now, is that they tag image information with GPS coordinates. Thanks to some easy online tools, you can now track people only by their pictures.

Lets get an example. I did a Google Search for “shots taken with my iPhone” and the first result is a blog with “9 Cracking Shots Taken With My iPhone“. The second picture posted is a pic taken on a road supposedly in Death Valley. Lets see if it is.

A test image for GPS EXIF inforation

We can download a program to view where the photo was taken via its EXIF information. Programs like “Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OSX” work well. Or you could install a FireFox extension like “EXIF Viewer“, it’s a very nice way to quickly view information for any image embedded on a web page. But both of these seem silly to install when you probably only need to view EXIF info once in a blue moon.

My new favorite way to view where photos were taken is to use online tools like “Jeffery’s EXIF Viewer” or the “Find EXIF” website. So, using our example, we would: Right click the image, Copy Image Location, Paste the image location into one of the online tools. In this example I’ve used Jeffery’s EXIF viewer that embeds a nice little Google Maps pin of where the image says it was taken. Results from the EXIF GPS information

And if you follow the links over to Google Maps, and drop a street view pin as close to GPS data as possible, you get this:

Results from the iPhone's GPS EXIF info

You can view the actual Google Street view location here. Pretty cool.

There are two types of docks available for laptops:

Dock for the Dell Latitude Series

1. Docks that require your laptop to be open and running to use and use a low performance method of connection. These docks are available for almost any laptop and use a single USB cable to hook up. I really won’t recommend them for a couple of reasons: They’re low performance and they require that the laptop be sitting open and have the laptop screen on when plugged into them. This means if you want to type on your other screen with a real keyboard and mouse, you’ll have to have your laptop sitting out and open on the desk.
2. Docks that have a dedicated port and sit in a cradle. These are high performance and do not require your computer to be open when in use. In addition these docks usually include significantly more connectivity options. This is the type of dock I use every day here at work. I recommend this style over the USB style.

If you want to go with a cradle style dock then that limits your options. There aren’t many 17” laptops compatible with a cradle style of dock. The Dell Latitude laptop series is the best choice at this time. Their larger size laptop has a 15.6” screen.

If you really want a larger computer and don’t mind having your laptop sitting out while docked or just want to skip the dock all together, then you have more options.

Targus Universal USB Dock

USB docks like the the Targus Universal USB Dock allow almost any size and style computer the ability to have a dock.

One of our users has a HP desktop that was having issues playing audio from music CDs. The audio was constantly stuttering and skipping. I tried various software playback programs all with the same result.

The solution turned out to be a setting for the CD-Rom drive. The drive was configured to use PIO mode when it should be configured to use DMA mode. Switching to DMA mode resulted in smooth audio CD playback. Here’s how to change the setting:

Solving Audio CD Suttering in Windows XP

The steps:

1. Right Click on My computer, click Manage
2. Select Device Manager from the list on the left
3. Expand the IDE ATA secton
4. Right click on each IDE Channel (you may have multiple Secondaries and Primaries), click Properties
5. Select the Advanced Settings tab
   Change the Transfer Mode to DMA if Available under each device
6. Repeat steps 4 & 5 for each Primary and Secondary IDE Channel
7. Reboot your computer

That should resolve the Audio CD stuttering and skipping under Windows XP.