my2cents

On a new OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard the Huwei E220 USB modem (from Swisscom in my case) didn’t work anymore. The USB dongle mounts and the files on the mounted drive were visible but the Unlimited Connection Manager (UCM) installer contained in the mounted drive crashed always. It’s obviously not compatible with 10.6.

To fix this you need to download the latest version from http://www.swisscom.ch/res/hilfe/downloads/mobile/unlimited/index.htm. It still says on that page that only 10.4 and 10.5 are supported but it works just fine with 10.6, too.

My rather new Brother started raising “false” alerts (at least I think they’re false…) about empty/dead toner. I had only printed a few hundred pages so far. In search for an answer Google directed me to http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806.

It’s a long and chaotic thread but about 1/5 from the top there is a posting that advises to do following for Brother HL-4040 and similar models:

For the toner life reset menu:
1 Open the front cover of the printer
2 press and hold the cancel button
3 press the reprint button while still holding cancel
- here is the reset menu – go to the appropriate cartridge on
- the menu and reset it and you’re done!
FYI… Pressing the “Go” button and the up arrow gives you the parts life reset menu (drum, laser, fuser, etc.)

I also did the electric tape over the windows – which worked before the reset – but I thought this fact would be helpful too.

For anyone that is asking “what window?” I think it is the clear plastic opening on the sides of the cartridges where you can actually see the powder inside the cartridge – the color of the toner (magenta, yellow, or cyan). I didn’t really know that for sure when I tried, but it made sense, and it worked. So I am fairly sure that is the “window” you should be trying to cover.

Thousands of people are having troubles with those Huawei USB modems (assumption based in search engine results and forum posts). Here’s a list of steps to try out or hints to consider if you run into issues installing the drivers and/or software:

• Always log in with a user account that has local admin permissions.
• Once you’ve found an USB plug that works, always hook up the modem to the same plug.
• If you see an error that “the device has been disconnected or is unavailable” when you try to connect, the following might help. The problem was that during installation Windows didn’t recognize the modem’s data interface. Hence, no modem was installed as far as Windows is concerned:
  • Go to My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager
  • Disconnect the USB modem.
  • Right-click on each entry in Universal Serial Bus controllers and choose “uninstall”.
  • Restart the PC.
  • Re-connect the USB modem to the first USB plug. Windows will initialize the device, pay attention to all the messages it displays at the lower right bottom of your screen. It will most likely initialize the device as an USB mass storage device, a CD-ROM, etc. AND hopefully as a “Data Interface”. If it never shows the mesage for data interface you have to try the device on the next USB plug.
  • If Windows brings up an installation dialog for the data interface, allow it to get the drivers from the internet, but tell it to also check in <folder_where_you_installed_Swisscom_software>\Driver\WinXP for suitable drivers (it might not find them otherwise).
  • If the Device Manager doesn’t list Huawei in the Modems and Ports section, you won’t be able to open a connection. Start all over with this guide

List of Windows control panel application and the name of the respective .cpl file in the %systemroot%\system32 folder. Uuuhhhm, you ask how knowing this should help you? Well, in the control panel you can’t simply right-click an application an chose “Run as…” from the context menu – that option is not available. Hence, you need to find the respective .cpl file and repeat that operation there…

For explanations check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Control_Panel_applets_(Windows)

I just spent way too much time looking for information for an ASUS P4S8L mainboard built into a Pundit PC. The mainboard is not listed in the proper section on asus.com. I finally figured that in the ‘Product’ category one must not choose ‘Mainboard’ (which would be obvious, right) but ‘Barebone’ instead. Then you need to pick ‘Pundit’ -> ‘Pundit-S’.

To easen this for you I attached the mainboard manual to this post.

If you’re not logged in as an administrator on a Windows machine you won’t be able to install a MSI package. What’s worse, there’s no “Run as…” command in the context menu (as with other executables) if you right-click the MSI file. There’s a work-around for that described in “Installing MSI packages with elevated privileges”.

In case this link ever becomes dead, here’s what to do:

1. Open registry editor
2. Add a new key “runas” under HKCR\Msi.Package\shell
3. Now set the default value of this key to “Install &as…”
4. Now create the subkey HKCR\Msi.Package\shell\runas\command
5. Set the default value of this subkey to msiexec /i “%1″

From time to time I surf some hacker/virus coder sites to check on the “mood” of those people. From current articles and incidents one could draw the conclusion that the end was near.

A desperate call to the community not to give up and not to turn their backs on virus coding: http://vx.netlux.org/29a/29a-6/29a-6.111

Yet another “community” (see next link) ceased to exist: http://www.rrlf.de.vu/

A virus coder broods about the relative success – and the lack thereof – of various types of collaborations: http://spth.host.sk/sowesh.txt That sounds so infantile, troubled, and sad. Like the lonely hackers confined to their computers in dark rooms finally realized that there’s a real world out there. A world with real people, that form close-to-real communities based on trust and respect united through common values.

Acronis TrueImage is IMO by far the best backup solution. I stopped using Norton Ghost years ago and didn’t regret it a single day.

For quite some time, however, I wasn’t able to have the backup data (usually a hard drive or partition image)  stored on a different computer over the network. TrueImage simply wasn’t able to locate any other computers in the network. I ascribed this to a crappy network setup and didn’t analyze the problem. A few days ago I realized that TrueImage – at least version 9 – has a problem automatically configuring the LAN adapter over DHCP.

The automatically set subnet mask was 255.255.0.0 although my network was using 255.255.255.0. So I switched off manual configuration in TrueImage, adjusted the subnet mask setting and now it works like a charm. A simple flag makes all the difference…To change the settings you need to open the configuration dialog through the options menu and look for LAN/network settings.

At work I recently had to disable the Acrobat plugin in IE in order to have the same environment as the customer who reported a bug in our software that wasn’t reproducible on my system.
Since I didn’t want to *uninstall* but only temporarily *disable* the plugin I started digging in IE’s Internet Options. There I found a few promising Adobe entries in Programs -> Content that I disabled. Unfortunately, neither a browser restart nor logout/login showed any effect.
The solution is to open the Adobe Acrobat Reader separately as an individual application. Then go to Edit -> Options -> Internet (or Preferences -> Internet on a Mac) and uncheck the “Display PDF in browser” flag.

I’m probably the 100 millionth Microsoft Outlook user who ran into the dreaded winmail.dat-issue while switching from POP3 to IMAP. I posted to the microsoft.public.outlook newsgroup for help, but got none.

In the meantime I found a rather straight forward solution to move all my Outlook email from a .pst/.ost file to the IMAP server. You just have to leave the Microsoft world:

1. Install Mozilla Thunderbird
2. Tell it to import the email from your current Outlook installation
3. Create a new IMAP account in Thunderbird
4. Move all the imported email to the IMAP server with Thunderbird
5. I case you still want to switch back to Outlook – chances are that you won’t, since Outlook is a real bitch when it comes to IMAP support:
   1. Uninstall Thunderbird
   2. Create a new IMAP account in Outlook
   3. Delete your old POP3 account