I was going to use the Microsoft Group Shot software this evening for some editing on a photo but the software has expired and Microsoft haven’t posted a new version online – a real shame as how am I going to do my clone shots now?
Update It turns out that setting your clock back to September 2006 gets this working again –
Thanks to the Fatwallet forums, you can get Taxcut Premium, Federal and State and EFile for $29.99 with a $10 in store check. You can order this online at OfficeDepot and when you select in-store pickup the price drops to $29.99 – the rebate form is here. Unfortunately our nearest officedepot closed at the new year and the next nearest is 30miles away….now Staples price match so…….. not sure if they will honour this one – ymmv –Update Staples wouldn’t price match for me in Columbus Ohio as there are no office depot’s near by 🙁
One of my WSUS boxes had a log file in the C:\Program Files\Update Services\LogFiles directory that was 60MB big – normally these are deleted by WSUS itself, with a backup copy of the previous log kept as SoftwareDistribution.log.old. However the permissions on the folder were set such that Network Service (which WSUS runs under) did not have permissions to create new files in the directory. As it could not create files, it was unable to move the existing file to .old and create a new logfile to start writing entries in. By granting Network Service change permissions to the C:\Program Files\Update Services\LogFiles directory and then restarting the Update Services directory, the SoftwareDistribution.log file was renamed to .old and a new file created. Inspiration for this was found at EventID
I was going to upload some photos tonight to Flickr using Windows Live Photo Gallery and the flickr plugin that I find very useful for uploading my picoftheday photo. Tonight however every time that it tried to connect it crashed. Initially I thought that it was a problem with the size of the files as I hadn’t uploaded the full size photos before so I switched to the web interface and then realised that Flickr had been taken offline for some maintenance work – unfortunately this broke the flickr plugin. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for todays picoftheday. I have three photos that I can’t decide between so I’m probably going to start a 365 rejects set too.
There’s a pretty funny video doing the rounds on Bill’s last day from the CES keynotes. I’m wondering who will sign my MCSE certificate when I get there…..
As part of my effort in trying to improve my photography skills I have set up a PicADay set in Flickr. The most efficient way to view these photos is with an RSS reader but unfortunately Flickr doesn’t easily provide the links for the RSS feed. However by installing the Flickr RSS greasemonkey script you get one click access. Alternatively you can create an RSS feed using the Yahoo Pipes interface and a nice web page builder kindly provided by alto maltés. The end result is my PicADay RSS feed. I have include these pics automatically on Absoblogginlutely! – IRL but for this I used the Flickr Widget (unfortunately the authors website is broken so there is no point in linking to it).
My idea of putting a donate button on web pages that users arrive at after coming from Google or other search engines is now online. The process wasn’t simple as there doesn’t seem to be a plugin for Movabletype to include this sort of information. The steps I took are in the extended entry.
According to Google Analytics, the following are my most popular posts. Funnily enough, the post to Manually Remove Google Desktop had twice the number of hits to the Absoblogginlutely! home page.
- Manually removing Google Desktop
- Absoblogginlutely!
- Unknown error 0x80040600 – Outlook corrupt emails in deleted items.
- Clientdiag for troubleshooting WSUS
- Fixing vpmsece.dll errors in outlook (Symantec AV plugin problems). Interestingly I posted this in 2003!
- Audible to mp3 (how to conversion)
- Backup Exec jobs won’t run but go to queued.
- Spell Check not working in Word. Word hides the option in a very strange location.
- Svchost crash with 0x745f2780. Need to install a hotfix from Microsoft.
- Error 0x80096001 when trying to run Windows Updates
85% of my traffic came from search engines – 75% in total from Google. This shows I have great Google ranking but not many people stick around 🙁
I run a small site with only 61,000 unique visitors 2000 of whom are suprisingly on dialup, 45% of users use dsl or cable – no surprise there really. Internet explorer accounts for 68% of users which I think is pretty large for a technical site. The 8 users who visited more than 200 times in the past year really need to learn the benefit of RSS feeds – if that is you and you need some help then let me know. 53% of users are in the USA, 13% in the UK.
Finally, as all good statistics are not complete with some sort of a graphic here is a map of visitors from the world – there are very few locations that haven’t visited – Madagascar was one that I could actually recognise from the map.
Happy New Year everyone – I hope you all had a good evening. This is a quick post to announce my new blog, Absoblogginlutely! – IRL (IRL stands for In Real Life) and this will continue my no techie posts. I have had several users say that my main blog is too technical but they would still like to keep up to date with the news so feel free to head on over. I have been working on some of the content and posts over the Christmas break, but you’d be surprised as there doesn’t look like there is actually much there at the moment but the About Me page and the Contact Me page will make an appearance on this blog eventually.
There will be some cross posted content where appropriate, but this blog will focus on more of the Tech content and IRL will contain other things. This year I also intend to work on my photography skills and related content to that will be on IRL.
Liz wrote a post on why do givers not ask to be paid, something that I’ve been wondering this last week or so. I’ve received lots of thankyou emails and comments over the years on this blog from users who have been helped from the posts on this blog. I’ve also read other blogs where people have mentioned that they have made some money from donations on their website/application purely by having a donation button on there. After all if you don’t make it easy for users to donate or even ask them, then it’s unlikely they will.
Therefore I’ve been considering putting something like a paypal donation button on the blog posts so that if a post has helped someone then maybe they would like to donate. If it’s possible I’d like to only put it on pages where users have been referred by Google or other search engines. This way regular users who read the blog via the web wouldn’t get the donate button, rss readers wouldn’t get it, but those who I’ve really helped by providing answers would get the button on the page.
I’ve previously not put something like this on the website as it has always been my personal record of solutions that I have come across in my daily life and I like to help other people – getting the thank you emails and comments make my day (and they still do).
So what do you the readers think of this idea? Do you think I’m selling out or do you think it is a good idea? How many of you click the adverts on this blog already? (Some already do as I make a little money from adsense but not much).