Author Archives: daniel

Remote Desktop and ghost printers

For those who use RDP to reach Windows servers…

Event Viewer on the servers sometimes generates System Errors due to RDP sessions configured to try and connect printers… which don't exist on the servers.

Pretty silly, but it seems to often be the default for RDP, and it clogs up the Event Viewer with unnecessary errors, which slows you down when you go searching for actual errors.

It appears you can prevent this by configuring Remote Desktop to not try and use local printers in the session – eg under Remote Desktop, Options, Local Resources, switch off Printers.

You may need to configure this separately for each host you connect to… but those of us who have to look through Event Viewer for errors will save time, and thank you for it, if you do!

TV tuner for Mac Pro?

I’ve been delighted with the secondhand Mac Pro I got last year. It’s five years old, but probably the best Windows PC I’ve ever owned… we sometimes use OSX, and sometimes use Boot Camp to run Windows, and I did end up getting Parallels as well, which is able to boot the Boot Camp partition — this I think is nothing short of miraculous.

Anyway, our other Windows PC is due for replacement. I was thinking I’d wait and see what the next crop of Mac Minis were like, but it looks like I’ve again got the opportunity to pick up a used Mac Pro via the same workplace clearing more of them out. Same age, but (if my calculations are right) double the speed of the current Mac Mini. Given our usage patterns, this is a cheap easy upgrade… particularly if we put an SSD in it.

I’m now pondering: what’s the best TV tuner for it? That’s the main thing I miss about the HP desktop we had that died. (I did try and rip the tuner card out of that to try in the Mac under Windows. It didn’t work.)

So… Mac Pro TV tuners…

I’d prefer dual tuner. I’d want it to work with both OSX and Windows. In fact I’d go so far as to say that this second box will be mostly using Windows, and I’d want this to work with Windows Media Centre.

For a USB dual tuner, the Elgato EyeTV Diversity looks pretty good.

Asking around on Twitter, there was some good feedback:

(Why does Twitter’s embed tweet with “Include parent Tweet” not seem to work?)

It’d be used with a proper connection to a roof antenna, so not concerned about the mini antenna.

But I think I’d actually prefer an internal card, since I really don’t need it to be portable… and installed internally might be more out of the way/better for longevity.

Any good options?

PS. This ancient page talks about some options. Not sure how relevant it is anymore though.

A week to go for Google Reader – and… why is Feedly taking liberties with Chrome?

G Reader shuts down in a week.

I’ve been trying Feedly, but and have been trying to love it, but it’s annoying in a couple of significant ways.

Firstly, after clicking on a feed, I want to use the cursor down or Page Down key to move through the items in that feed. Unlike G Reader, Feedly doesn’t put the focus in the right place. Drives me up the wall.

Secondly, it’s embedding itself in multiple places in Chrome. First it put an icon of itself in the bottom-right of every browser tab (which even shows up in print outs, would you believe?)… and just in the last few days it’s started creating its own tab, which doesn’t even have a close icon on it. Is this conceited or what?

Feedly embeds itself into Chrome

Frankly this does not bode well for my future with Feedly, if they’re going to take liberties like this.

Perhaps it’s time to look at alternatives — even if they don’t have accompanying smartphone/iPad apps.

Anybody tried The Old Reader?

Any other good ones which are as close to Google Reader as possible?

"Spaced" DVDs – volume problems

I've been re-watching the DVDs of Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright sitcom Spaced, and noticing that the volume levels go up and down all the time. I didn't remember that being the case from the first time I watched them… which was on a previous DVD player (a Pioneer).

Turns out I'm not the only one to have this problem — those reporting there noted it was an issue on some Toshiba players, but I'm currently using a Sony.

I also have a Panasonic Blu-Ray player I could use, but it's not multi-region, and these discs are Region 2. Damn. And I can't see any easy way of hacking the player to make it multi-region, alas.

That's okay though, because taking a cue from the forum led me to this post about DVD sound problems, and also to a Wikipedia description of Dynamic Range Compression — leading me to think this was causing the issue.

I found this in the DVD player's setup menu. Once I'd switched it from “TV mode” to “standard”, all seemed to be okay again, though in contrast, a newer DVD of Parks & Recreation now seems to have its volume fluctuate, so perhaps I need to switch it back for everything other than Spaced. Odd.

Chrome crashing in OSX – fixed by re-installing

I’m no OS X expert, so I was a bit befuddled to find Google Chrome began crashing on startup a few days ago. Was it some evil Apple plot to lock Google out of the Mac?

Chrome crashing on start up in OSX

All the grisly details from the automated report are below… it's not the most readable of reports.

The fix: What I did was to download Chrome again and re-install. That seems to have fixed it for now.

Continue reading →

Sony Vegas 10: Out of memory when rendering

We were having issues rendering a reasonably complex but fairly short video using Sony Vegas 10 (32-bit) on a 64-bit machine (Win7 x64) with plenty of RAM and disk space free. After a few seconds each time, the rendering would stop dead with an Out Of Memory error.

I looked around on Google, where various discussion forums came to different conclusions about a fix (including changing the rendering thread and RAM options within Vegas) — and a 4-minute YouTube video claiming also to fix it — honestly, who has the time to watch something like that? — just give me the solution in words I can quickly scan and replicate.

I eventually found this:

I finally found the solution to Vegas giving me memory errors using CFF Explorer… This is what I did.

1) Using “CFF Explorer” I open the original “VegasMovieStudioPE100.exe” file.

2) Now go to “NT Header/File Header” and click “File Header”. There you will find a button labeled “click here”. Click it. And select the checkbox “App can handle> 2GB address space”

3) Now press the “ok”'s and when back on the main menu, click on the disk button and save the modified “.exe” file, overwrite the orginal one. (Note in Vista and 7 you must be running CFF Explorer in Administrator Mode).

Suddenly all my low memory errors were history and have been able to render all my movies with no issues.

Happily, this worked for us too. Hopefully repeating the fix here will help others find it more quickly. Thank you, “Lowlypawn” for posting your solution rather than just posting your problems like many do.

At some stage we'll upgrade to a newer (64-bit) video editing package. But it's nice to know this one can be cranked up to keep going for a bit longer.

It makes me wonder why (a) Sony hasn't issued their own information about this, and (b) something as incredibly useful as CFF Explorer isn't built into Windows.

Click through to read the full post, which includes feedback from Sony from when he contacted them about it.

How much memory should you have in your PC? How about 8Mb? #BackToThe90s

Charles Wright, the IT whiz who writes regularly in The Age Green Guide, and has a persistent habit of referring to himself in the plural, reckons in his latest column that you should have eight megabytes in your PC, but soon it'll be practical to have up to sixteen megabytes.

This quarter the price of RAM has jumped about 60 per cent as manufacturers shift the emphasis to production of mobile memory, squeezing supply of PC memory. The 8MB of Kingston RAM that we recommend is now $60, compared with $38 in December.
…
It's possible to see the future of desktop computing contained in a diminutive box into which the customer can stuff as much as 16MB of RAM and a fast mSATA SSD drive, at prices ranging from $500 to $700.

— The Age, 28/3/2013

Wow, don't go overboard on the RAM there Charles.

Charles Wright's column in The Age, 28/3/2013

New monitor

Mostly for my own records:

Since one of my two Samsung 940N 19″ monitors (bought in 2006) developed a horizontal line through it, I’ve replaced it with a 23.6″ Philips 247E3LSU2, which was $168 from Officeworks.

Bigger monitors wouldn’t really fit into the space.

It’s plugged into “Calculus”, the Mac Pro. I should get a DVI-D cable to get the best picture quality out of it… amazed at how damn expensive they can be retail. I’ve ordered one from DealExtreme instead (no particular rush – the VGA cable I have may not be optimum, but it works).

Much spam from iCMG/KnowledgeHut/bmsend

At work I’m getting repeated spams from one mob which send surprisingly similar emails about conferences and training from various domains, which include:

enterprisearchitecturetrainingtoday.com
businessawards2013.com
BPMArchitects.com
newbpmtraining.net
myenterprisearchitecture.com
telcoarch.com
thebpmtraining.com
businessintelligencelive.com (added 2014-01-13)
enterprisearchitecturetrainer.com (added 2014-04-01)
mycloudcomputingtrainingnow.com (added 2014-04-07)
sixsigmaaccreditation.com — (added 2014-07-24 — also noted use of the brand name KnowledgeHut )
itilfoundationoceana.com — (added 2014-08-06 — still using KnowledgeHut name)
Sent by pmta90.dedicated.bmsend.com on behalf of BusinessAnalysisProgram.com (added 2014-08-18)
primeverastudy.com (added 2014-08-26)
mybusinesscasewriting.com (added 2014-09-16)
finance4nonfinace.com (added 2014-09-16)
ApacheHadoopbootcamp.com (added 2014-09-18)
pmtrainingPrograms.com (added 2014-09-18)
sixsigmaforbeginers.com (added 2014-09-26 — note typo)
msptrainingnow.com (added 2014-09-26)
mspaccreditationnow.com (added 2014-09-30)
prince2bootcamptoday.com (added 2014-09-30)
pmprojectnplanning.com (added 2014-10-03)
myprince2certification.com (added 2014-10-13)
mspbootcamptoday.com (added 2014-10-15)
ITILfoundationgulf.com (added 2014-10-22)
financialmodelinginexcel.com (added 2014-10-27)
scrumbootcampnow.com (added 2014-10-30)
knowledgehutglobal.com (added 2014-10-30)
businesssuccesstrainings.com (added 2014-11-10)
primeveratraining.com (added 2014-11-14)
sixsigmaintialsquare.com (added 2014-12-09 — note it appears to misspell “initial”)
projectmgmttoday.com (added 2014-12-19)
businesscasewritingcourseware.com (added 2014-12-19)
mspadvancecoursefinder.com (added 2014-12-19)
agilescruminitiatives.com (added 2015-01-12)
fpasnap.com (added 2015-01-13)
itilfoundationstudy.com (added 2015-01-22)
financialmodelingnexcel.com (added 2015-02-17)
scrumaccreditationcase.com (added 2015-02-17)
pgmpinitiatives.com (added 2015-03-05)
pmcertin.com (added 2015-02-17 — includes “itilsearch.com” in unsubscribe links)
sixsigmalearnings.com (added 2015-02-17 — other domains mentioned include bmsend.com, bmetrack.com, alliancestudy.com)
agileinitiatives.com (added 2015-03-11)
hadoopclassroomwork.com (added 2015-03-11)
pmprojectsolutionprogram.com (added 2015-03-16)
scrumtrainingtoday.com (added 2015-04-10)
global-health.com (added 2015-05-14 — using bmsend.com… Is this ICMG branching out into health services, or a different company making use of the same spam sending service? Looks like the latter. They even quote an Melbourne address: Level 2, 607 Bourke Street)
prepmtrain.com (added 2015-06-25 — also quotes pmatsearch.com in the dodgy unsubscribe link)
businesscasewritinginfo.com (added 2015-07-15)
cbapcourses.com (added 2015-07-15)
BusinessanalysisProfessionals.com (added 2015-07-15)
msproject2013tutor.com (added 2015-07-21)
businesscasewritingnewapps.com (added 2015-08-24)
agileandscrumintro.com (added 2015-12-02)
projectmanagementgain.com (added 2015-12-02)
itilpractice.com (added 2015-12-02)
msprojectmethods.com (added 2015-12-10)
Pythonread.com (added 2015-12-10)
bcwbusiness.com (added 2015-12-10)
businesscasewritingnow.com (added 2015-12-22)
learnbusinesscase.com (added 2015-12-22)
itilfreshtutor.com (added 2016-04-06)
coreproject.co (added 2016-04-06)
androiddevelopmentnow.com (added 2016-04-06) – emails include subject lines proclaiming “Learn Andorid”!
officepersonalsecretary.com (added 2016-04-06)
projectsmgmts.com (added 2016-04-28)
msprojectnewprofessional.com (added 2016-05-18)
sixsigmaapps.com (added 2016-05-18)
prince2newsession.com (added 2016-05-18)
Professionalsofbusinessanalysis.com (added 2016-06-21)
deftanalyze.com (added 2016-06-21)
skillcentrics.com (added 2016-06-21) – used as a Reply-To address
bigdatahadooptutors.com (added 2016-06-21)
iosdvptraining.com (added 2016-06-21)
angularjsconceptstraining.com (added 2016-06-21)
pm-careers.com (added 2016-06-22)
Latestprojectmanagement.com (added 2016-06-22)
scrumstudies.com (added 2016-06-28)
scrummasterscert.com (added 2016-06-29) – this appears to be sent via mailerinteractive.com
elationproject.com (added 2016-07-04)
itsm-skills.com (added 2016-08-23)
certs-skill.com (added 2016-08-23)

Apart from using many different domains, these guys also continually change the address within the domain, and Outlook doesn’t appear to be able to consign an entire domain to the blocked senders list.

Many include this footer:

You are receiving this e-mail because you happen to be either our client or were added to our comprehensive database on account of your contribution in the IT domain. However, should you no longer wish to receive any further mails from our side, please Click here Unsubscribe iCMG | Level 9, Avaya House, 123 Epping Road, North Ryde, NSW.| Phone +61 2 8005 0977

…but of course I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work… it probably only served to prove to them that mine was a live address.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the street address quoted is a serviced office.

I have been putting these domains into the spam senders list in Exchange, but they still get through. I can only assume that the list in Exchange is a “soft” one.

Annoying.

I have, of course, passed on a spam message to the ACMA spam reporting people… but I don’t hold out much hope of any success there.

I’m adding additional domains as they come up — when I get the chance. It’s interesting to see that some of them include spelling errors; most are just semi-random buzzwords stuck together.

Microsoft security bulletins using software “not licensed for commercial use”

I can’t help noticing that in the last couple of weeks, Microsoft’s security bulletin emails have been sent as PGP signed messages using a copy of PGP Desktop that is “not licensed for commercial use”.

...
This newsletter was sent by:
Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington, USA
98052


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Desktop 10.2.0 (Build 1950) - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
Charset: utf-8

wsFVAwUBURwisxWqSyu+jsPhAQjyGQ//fj/k7Fb2zIr2gcINPs66n3SAEdNp41eO
mvTuT/knbPdZNhECQaFcQulaTgOgUDMCIVPT+NWTWBBuoqaXUuMhPKMaro6Bv0Be
...

I suppose a small struggling startup company like Microsoft can be excused for not paying to update keep their commercial licence up to date.