So I upgraded to Thunderbird 3 some time ago. It has nice new features, like the grouped folders. Anyway, there are a few things that annoyed me too; one of them being the fact that whenever someone sends a mail to me and some other people, only the first recipient was displayed, with a “more…” button next to it. The settings unfortunately do not allow to turn this behaviour off, but there’s a hack to do this (maybe in the future, they’ll include a setting…)  Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever tried to embed video files in PowerPoint? If you managed to do that, have you ever tried to play that presentation on other PCs or even on a mac? It’s a pain in the ass. I haven’t yet reached the point to say it’s impossible, but at least I can say it’s far from being easy.

The background: If you want the presentation to work out of the box, on every machine, you need to choose a video format that every OS can play by default. This means:

• you can’t use MP4 or any other QuickTime format because QuickTime might not be installed on Windows PCs
• you can’t use WMV formats for the same reason, just on the mac side this time
• you can embed SWF files and flash can be played back on Windows and Mac OS, but because it relies on third party software as well, PowerPoint can only embed SWFs in the Windows version, using ActiveX controls. These are not available on PowerPoint Mac which means the embedded SWF in a PPT created on Windows won’t play when you open the PPT on a Mac
• Of course you can’t use Matroska/DivX/Xvid/other special codecs because that would require a codec pack, otherwise the video won’t play
• You can’t even use MPEG2 because at least Windows PCs can’t play it by default

So I think the only way to do it is to use MPEG1. This means big file sizes and low quality – which clearly sucks.

Do you know a better solution? I don’t…

Trying to integrate Zimbra calendars in Lightning, I ran into a couple of problems. So far I’ve found four different ways to do it in the internet:

1. ICS: http://zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
2. ICS: webcal://zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
3. ICS: webcal://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
4. CalDAV: http://zimbrahost.example.com/dav/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME

Now the ICS solutions don’t work properly for me, the calendar entries are loaded but Lightning is unable to write to the calendar (when editing entries, deleting entries, creating new entries).

CalDAV is working, but only when using one calendar, as it seems. I created a second calendar in the Zimbra Webinterface though, and when I try to add the second calendar the CalDAV way, I get a yellow warning sign next to the calendar name saying “The calendar <name> is not available at the moment”. So CalDAV seems to be limited to one Calendar per user or server.

I didn’t find a solution yet.

My boss is working with tons of mails every day. Part of his workflow is to use the “followup” -> “add reminder..:” function in the right-click menu of messages. When I upgraded his Outlook from 2003 to 2007, he asked why that function was gone. I did some investigation, including a phone call at Microsoft tech support, and found out the following:

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I use a little tool to manage my MP3s called “MP3 tag tools“. It’s quite powerful, it allows you to mass edit some or all ID3 tag fields, fill them from a file name scheme and vice versa (create folder structures and/or file names from the ID3 tag fields). Now when I recently cleaned up my collection using that tool, I noticed that I had about 400 double entries. I just didn’t notice before because the file names were different. Now as this tool tried to rename the files and put them in the appropiate subfolders, it threw error messages that existing files can’t be overwritten.

So I had 400 files that I could safely delete, which I did. Now I had 400 dead entries in the iTunes library (marked with a !) which I wanted to get rid of easily. Apparently, iTunes does not have a function to remove dead/broken entries, I’d have to try to play every song from my playlist so iTunes would mark all missing entries and then… then what? iTunes doesn’t even let me sort by the ! column. That’s really stupid.

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Hi folks!

I have that ultraportable notebook, a HP 2510p. It features a 12.1″ LED-backlit screen, ambient light sensor, fingerprint device and so much more. After about one year of usage, I can say that I love this device and wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. However, it’s not perfect. Battery runtime is pretty acceptable, about 5 hours w/ wireless LAN enabled. The CPU, an Intel Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage @ 1.2GHz is surprisingly fast.

The only big problem is the harddisk. Read the rest of this entry »

Often people ask me what is so wrong about the Internet Explorer. Apart from security issues, one of the reasons is the implementation of web standards. I recently stumbled upon the Acid3 Test which can be used to test how well web browsers follow web standards (read the wikipedia article if you want to know more).

So I fired up my browsers and opened the test pages. While the Acid2 test is mostly based on cascading style sheets (css), the Acid3 test mostly tests JavaScript and DOM implementation.

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Have you ever had an “unknown device” in the Windows device manager and wanted to get rid of it installing the appropiate driver? You just had no idea what device was meant?

This happened to me with a 32-bit PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor for my notebook (ok, I knew what device it was, but I couldn’t find a driver).

Here is what I found out on wikihow.com:

1. Open the device manager (I usually do this with the keyboard shortcut windows+pause -> hardware -> device manager)
2. Right-click the device and click “properties”, then click “details” tab
3. Choose “compatible IDs” from the drop-down menu
4. Click on the first item in the list and use ctrl+c to copy it to clipboard
5. Click Start -> Run, type “notepad”, this will bring up the text editor
6. Press ctrl+v to paste
7. Let’s say you have an ID like this: PCI\VEN_11AB&DEV_4320&REV_14
   This is the vendor/manufacturer ID, device ID and device revision number.
8. Now go to www.pcidatabase.com/vendors.php?sort=name. This brings up a list of hardware manufacturers and their IDs. Look for the manufacturer ID you got in the previous step (ctrl-f is your friend) and click the name. In my example, 11AB leads me to Marvell Semiconductor.
9. Now you have a list of known devices from that manufacturer. Again, find your device by searching for the device ID. My example brings up this:

   Chip Number: 88E8055
   Chip Description: Marvell Yukon PCI E Gigabit
   Notes: http://www.marvell.com/drivers

10. Now the device is identified. I can now go to the manufacturer’s homepage and try to find a driver.

When I connected my Acer AL2216W 22″ widescreen monitor to my HP 2510p notebook, I didn’t expect there to be problems. But there was a problem: For some reason, I was unable to set the resolution to 1680×1050, which is the monitor’s native resolution.

This took some more googling to find a solution. Here’s a short summary of what I found out:

1. Open the registry editor and do a Find on “DTD”.
2. Populate every occurence of TotalDTDCount with the number 1.
3. Populate every occurence of DTD_1 with the following string:

   21 39 90 30 62 1A 27 40 68 B0 36 00 D9 28 11 00 00 1C 37 01

   and be sure to keep searching until you are sure you got them all.

4. Reboot, and 1680×1050 should become available.

Now, if you need to set another resolution, things get a bit tricky.

You need to find out the correct DTD string (see step 3) for your resolution. That can be done using a small tool called MonInfo. How to do that and how to proceed is described in this article (it’s long but worth reading); I suggest you have a look at it