365 Discoveries

A new use for those bottle caps lying around to keep track of your weekend drink count

The Razer Lycosa keyboard, a gamer favorite, sold since 2007, garnered some bad press a few years ago due to a few bad batches of keyboards which left them either severely crippled or, at least, very annoying to use. Some keyboards succumb to an issue where the backlight refuses to stay on, the backlight will erratically cycle through the its options or the media buttons won’t respond.

It was found, in some cases, that the touchpad was installed incorrectly at the factory, and opening the keyboard to re-seat the touchpad would fix the issue. A MacGyver fix was found; when a dime or quarter is placed on the touch-sensitive media control area, the cycling ceased.

When I first applied this fix a couple years ago, I had no change available, but I did have a bottle cap which worked just fine! Doing this renders the touchpad useless, but it does prevent the backlight from cycling. After a few months of the bottle cap being in place, I removed it and went for about a year without any issues. Just recently, however, the problem return, and I happened to have another bottle cap at the ready!

In response to: Charter Starts Internet Video Trials

Charter is the latest cable operator to fire up their “TV Anywhere” Internet video ambitions — a “cord cutter” retention tool that involves giving paying TV customers access to a walled garden of limited TV content. While Charter has yet to name the service yet, last week they launched a trial of their TV Everywhere incarnation involving 5,000 to 10,000 Charter subscribers in St. Louis, Missouri, Madison, Wisconsin, Chicopee, Massachusetts, and Kennewick, Washington. Charter will be running the trial for the rest of the year before deciding whether they want to take the project footprint wide.

The big cable companies, not just Charter, are pushing this “TV Anywhere” as a way to prevent cord cutters. The idea is to offer some online video to subscribers in addition to regular cable to make paying loads of cash for cable service more appealing. The problem? TV Anywhere isn’t “anywhere,” it’s only in your desktop browser, only when you’re logged in, and it’s nothing you can’t already see on Hulu. In fact, it’s probably far less. I saw a preview of a TV Anywhere look-alike through AT&T’s portal. All AT&T had was searchable list of episodes and shows you could watch… on Hulu. Clicking any link simply brought up some AT&T page with a embedded Hulu video.

TV Anywhere is funny to me, because, on one hand you have the cable execs telling the press they’re not losing any sleep over online video. Then you see initiative like TV Anywhere, seeing they’re investing millions into online video hoping that it appeals enough to their subscribers to keep them. Why would you create TV Anywhere if your customers weren’t looking for online video as a replacement for cable?

Next step? Bandwidth caps where TV Anywhere is exempt.

You go to shutdown your Windows XP computer only to find you’re not given the option. The only option available to you is log off. The same behavior is experienced when logged in as either a local or domain administrator. What’s up? Well, it could be that your local security settings are set (on purpose) to disallow this behavior. If you’re looking at this thinking, “Hey, I am the administrator and this isn’t what I wanted!” You might simply have a corrupt security policy. Run a gpupdate at the command prompt to download a new copy. If that’s no bueno, check our your local security settings (hint: secpol.msc) to make sure nothing funny is in there.

A network administrator at my work came across this issue and was denied access to change a “disallow” shutdown setting in local security settings even logged in as thedomain admin, local admin, safe mode, whatever. It turns out something in the local security settings had become corrupt and a gpupdate command didn’t do a thing. The final solution? A neat little command that resets the security settings to default. Why the network admin was able to do a reset and not change a setting, who knows, but I hope it can help you:

Note: This procedure may remove users from any local security groups, so be sure to take note of all the users in those groups.

1. At command prompt, run: secedit /configure /cfg %windir\repair\secsetup.inf /db /secsetup.sdb /verbose
2. Reboot computer

Local security settings should be reset default now and will download the correct settings from the domain.

(CC-licensed image by cosmocatalano)

In Excel, moving the mouse anywhere on the screen will result in selecting all cells the mouse passes over. Excel does not respond to the right or left-click and can only be closed forcibly. In other words, the mouse cursor behaves as if the left-click is being pressed while in Excel causing it to do nothing but select cells indefinitely.

I believe this issue to primarily be a conflict with the Novell GroupWise Office integration (ODMA) for Microsoft Office. Secondarily, it may be an issue with the mouse driver.

Resolution:

1. In GroupWise, turn off or uninstall integrations (who likes them anyway?)
2. Search the computer and remove any instances of GWxl97.xla or GWXLUS.XLA.
3. In Excel, reset the Worksheet Menu Bar by going to View > Toolbars > Customize > Toolbars… then select “Worksheet Menu Bar” and hit Reset… This screen also shows a “Standard” toolbar which sometimes must also be reset.
4. Reboot.
5. If the issue persists, remove the mouse driver, reboot, and allow Windows to install a generic driver.
6. If the issue still persists, remove the mouse driver, install the driver specific to the mouse and reboot.
7. If the issue persists, then it’s not an issue with GroupWise integrations or your mouse driver. Good luck!

This is caused by a corrupt DLL file; seems to happen thanks to Windows Update. I’m not sure if this issue occurs in any other OS than Windows XP.

Replace FM20.dll in the user’s \%windir%\system32\ with the FM20.dll from a computer without the issue.

Google announced today the launch of their public DNS service. As of right now, all it provides is DNS resolution, while OpenDNS provides a plethora of options.

If you want to give it a try, Google got a pretty epic IP address grab. Use the following IP addresses for your DNS:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

As always, the service is in beta, so be sure to copy down your current DNS settings before switching over just in case something goes awry. Google is even providing support telephone numbers in the event you’re unable to access the Internet using their DNS.

Update: I ran tests using Namebench from 3 different locations within my city. Two locations use the same ISP, the third is its own ISP. In all tests, UltraDNS and OpenDNS came out on top. Various Tier3 DNS servers (4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.6, etc) also ranked highly. In all tests, Google’s public DNS servers ranked well, but still towards the bottom of the pile.

Looking for a cheap, legitimate, almost free Windows 7 copy? Microsoft is offering Windows 7 Home Ultimate or Windows 7 Professional (32 and 64-bit versions) for $30 to college students with a valid .edu email address. Head on over to the order page, enter your email address and get in your pre-order! For the record, Windows 7 upgrades retail for $200. Take note: If you want the Professional version, click the link that says “Need to join your school’s network domain? Click here”. Since its the same price, I recommend getting the professional version since there are more usable features than Home, and less useless features than those contained in Ultimate.

Windows 7 will be available for download on October 22; those who pre-order will be sent a reminder email with the download link on that day.

The offer is good until January 3, 2010. Check out the table below to see what kind of upgrade experience you’ll be looking at. Keep in mind, though, if you purchase an upgrade instead of a full retail version, you need to keep the  discs and keys for the OS you’re upgrading. If you ever need/want to reinstall Win 7, you’ll need those things.

Windows 7 Upgrade Chart