Tag Archives: howto

Howto: Remove Roku from Amazon account (or other devices)

Amazon and Roku seem to make it hard to delete a Roku or other device from your Amazon account and most people say to go to the My Digital library and remove the device. However at time of writing (March 2012) this advice is incorrect.
Instead sign into your amazon account and then go to https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/pin
You will have your roku or other device listed, select delete and then confirm the deletion. Seconds later you will be able to register your roku with Amazon again. Of course if you don’t have access to the original Amazon account then you will need to factory reset the Roku first.

How to get mobi files into the Android Kindle app

I got a free .mobi file today and it took a couple of minutes to get the file working in the Kindle app on the android. First of all, download the mobi file to the android. By default it will save it in the download file on the SD card. Then using your application of choice, move the file to the kindle directory. If you have the kindle application running, you will need to kill it and then relaunch it so that the kindle app restarts and realizes the file has been loaded.
I use the OI File Manager app for moving files on the android, and Advanced Task Killer to kill applications when required. The other android apps I use can be seen at my Absoblogginlutely appbrain page

Howto enable Group Policy event logging in Windows2008

There are many websites on the internet that talk about the previous method of enabling group policy logging by adding the UserEnvDebugLevel registry entry as per Microsoft kb article 221833. Unfortunately this does not work in Windows2008 and the kb article does not link to another article that does work.

However I found out that this was changed (in Vista I think) to a different registry entry and a new log file is created. Create a new Dword value called GpSvcDebugLevel under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Diagnostics and set the value to 100002 (in hex). This will then create a file called gpsvclog.log in the %windir%\debug directory.

It looks like the preferred method of debugging the logs is to read the events that are stored in Eventvwr under Applications and Services Logs\ Microsoft\ Windows\ GroupPolicy\ Operational

Live Communicator 2005 fails to install – fixed

I had a client’s LiveCommunicator 2005 stop working and part of the troubleshooting was to remove the software and reinstall. Unfortunately, when I went to reinstall the software, the installation was interrupted and did not complete. No errors were logged in the event log but by looking at the install log file and searching for “return value 3” (standard practise when debugging msi installs) I found the following “ActivateTimeBomb. Return value 3”.  A google  search only pulled back 3 results, all for Live Communicator which was a good  sign, but I did find a posting on the appdeploy forums that offered a solution.  I had already applied this patch to the server but had not needed to apply it to the client before, but doing so fixed the problem. The patch file can be found from the kb article 974571 or a direct download.

I was suprised to see how little information was available on google and how useless the install process was. The timebomb information was hidden away in the install log and  knowing that “Return Value 3” was the key to a successful troubleshooting session.