Monday, November 28, 2005 

Windows Environment Variables

As a matter of convenience when navigating Windows Explorer, you can use the system's environment variables to quickly locate certain folder locations. This can be especially useful when the Windows installation is not using default values (say the system drive is D: or you've moved the home folder). From the address bar, just type the following to get to the specified folder:
  • %systemroot% (Windows directory, eg: c:\windows)
  • %windir% (Windows directory, eg: c:\windows)
  • %systemdirectory% (The Windows system directory, eg: c:\windows\system32)
  • %homepath% (Current user's home directory, eg: c:\documents and settings\user)

10:53 AM | |

Tuesday, November 08, 2005 

Fixing Outlook's Reminders

One of my Exchange users was having problems with her calendar. Every time she was in Outlook, she was greeted with the following error:
There was a problem reading one or more of your reminders. Some reminders may not appear. Cannot locate recurrence information for this appointment.
This resulted in a few problems such as not getting any reminders unless logged into the system using OWA and the inability to sync her calendar with her Palm Treo 650. Taking a look online for solutions resulted in many unrelated issues, the most popular being an MSKB article that requires a hotfix for Outlook 2000. Since my system is Outlook 2003-based, this wasn't helpful at all.

Turns out that the problem was with a corrupted recurring calendar item. To ferret it out and delete it, you need to find all the recurring appointments in your calendar:
  • In Outlook, click the Calendar folder
  • Go to the View menu, choose Arrange By > Current View > Recurring Appointments
  • Then you should open each appointment located in that filtered view until you locate the item that gives you an error that the item cannot be opened. Note the appointment's details and then delete it.
  • Once deleted, you can go back to the default view by going into the View menu and choosing Arrange By > Current View > Day/Week/Month
Once complete, reminders should once again be active.

3:11 PM | |

 

Troubleshooting Firefox

For as many years as PDF has been popular, I've always hated viewing them within the browser. So on all the systems I use, I choose to disable the plug-in and have the PDF saved to my desktop instead. Thus it was a little irritating to see that Firefox stopped downloading PDFs correctly and just hung as it finished the download. I finally had a chance take a look and started by reinstalling Firefox. This didn't make any difference, so I dug a little deeper and backed up the profile. To find your profile, open Windows Explorer and type the following in the address bar and hit Enter:
%appdata%\Mozilla
From there, I'd suggest renaming the Firefox folder so you have your bookmarks and settings backed up. Then when you launch Firefox, it will generate a new profile folder:
%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default
Once that's done you can reapply your settings (in this case disabling the PDF plug-in). Just a note of caution: make sure Firefox is closed before you attempt moving your bookmarks.html file from your old profile. Otherwise Firefox will delete it and use its last backup (the default bookmarks.bak in the new profile) once the program has been closed.

1:16 PM | |

Monday, November 07, 2005 

Reset Your iPod

Not a hard tip but one that can be useful when your iPod freezes, frequently due to hard drive vibrations. For a 3G iPod (which has a row of buttons across the top), you simultaneously press the Menu+Play/Pause buttons. For a 4G iPod (any device with the click-wheel), you would hold the center button+Menu simultaneously.

This may clear some personal settings such as On-The-Go Playlists that have not been synced to iTunes.

12:29 PM | |