Now this was a weird one. The user said he was unable to work because every 20 seconds, his programs in which he was working were hidden and the desktop would show up. He told me he already rebooted the machine. So I opened the End Tasks dialog with Cmd-Alt-Esc and forced a finder restart….
Continue reading →To all other sysadmins out there in the world: Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 2009!
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Recently, I had a support query where a colleague had three “Flash Player” items in the open with menu when he right clicked onto a .swf file and I was asked to remove them. I learnt that it’s not as easy as it often is with Windows, where every file extension has an entry in…
Continue reading →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,…
Continue reading →These are my post-installation steps in Fedora 10. After I read that Fedora 10 is out on heise.de, I thought, let’s give it a try. Here I’ll describe what I did to set up the fresh install for my needs. Note: I installed Fedora 10 from the full i386 DVD (not live CD!) on my…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It was used as a backup drive there. Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It couldn’t be accessed from…
Continue reading →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…
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