I recently had an employee whose AutoCAD was playing up. Clicking file open didn’t load the usual windows file browser, the command was asking you to type the file name you wanted, not exactly the most productive way to open a file.

Fortunately there is a very quick and simple fix, you just need to change the filedia flag from 0 to 1.

To do that press escape so you are back at the normal command prompt in AutoCAD and then type:

filedia (when you press space afterwards it should prompt you with “Enter new value for FILEDIA <0>:)
then type the number “1″ and hit <return>

That should be it, when you go to file open, the file browser should now show again.

I’m not sure why this happened, my employee came to me with this problem and they definitely hadn’t entered filedia in the command prompt before and then 0 to turn it off so it must have been from an earlier crash or system fault?

I noticed TomTome HOME software had a “Backup my device” option which is meant to just take a complete snapshot of your device to allow for a full restore at a later date.

After clicking to run the backup I was presented with a progress bar:

and then after a few mintutes I was told the backup had failed “An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer”

with the option to click to view further details, which look like:

ERROR: DesktopLib/FileCopy/Error: An error occurred. Unable to create the files required to copy this item to your computer.
@ .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp(161)
An error occurred while reading this file: “F:\autorun.inf”
An error occurred while writing to this file: “C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\TomTom\HOME\Backup\ONE\Backup01\InternalMemory\autorun.inf”
Access is denied.

in .\controller\FileCopyThread.cpp:161
Stack:
0. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/commit.js:82
error(textOrException);
1. chrome://tthome/content/ui/bindings/ttwizard.xml:1061
this._commitFailed(i, commitPage);
2. chrome://tthome/content/logic/util.js:79
return func.apply(obj, arguments);
3. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:77
this._errorCallback(e);
4. chrome://tthome/content/logic/dllUtils.js:69
this._errorFatal(error);

Time: Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:15:29 GMT

Straight away I knew what the problem would be, my anti-virus and anti-malware software. The first error occurred reading a file called “autorun.inf” and it seems trying to copy this to my local disk. Auto-copying an autorun.inf file will almost certainly set alarm bells ringing in most good anti-virus software.

After disabling the anti-virus software

and running the backup option again it all went through without an error.

Versions:
TomTom Home v 2.8.2.2264
Windows XP SP3
TomTom One IQ Routes Edition
Trend Micro Worry Free Business Edition

Username is in use – the program cannot connect you at this time

Your only option is to click OK which isn’t very helpful. Even after a full system reboot the same thing happens. Note that I use Sage 50 Accounts Plus 2011 (v17) but I’ve had the same thing happen before in Sage 2010, 2007 etc and the principal behind the fix hasn’t changed so give it a try.

After half an hour on the phone to Sage support, there is a very simple solution:

1. Click on Start–>My Computer
2. Double click on the C:\ drive or which ever drive letter has your \Documents and Settings\ folder on and double click to go into the \Documents and Settings\ folder
3. Double click to go into the \All Users\ folder
4. Double click to go into the \Application Data\ folder
   [if you can't see an \Application Data\ folder and the first in the list alphabetically is \Desktop\ then you need to click on Tools in the menu bar, the Folder Options, then click on the View tab and look in the list for "Show hidden files and folders" and select this option, then you should be able to see the \Application Data\ folder although it might look feint or greyed out.
5. Once in the C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\ folder scroll down and then double click on \Sage\ folder
6. Double click to go into the \Accounts\ folder
7. Then depending on when you first setup the account click to go into that year, in my case I have a \2010\ and a \2011\ folder but my data is in the \2010\ folder so double click to go into the year.
8. You should then see a \Company.000\ folder, I assume that if you have a license for multiple company accounts there may be several of these, one for each company accounts but in my instance I have a single user and single company licence so I just have one \Company.000\ so click to go into that
9. Once in \Company.000\ click on the \ACCDATA\ folder
10. Nearly there.... I am now in the following directory:
    C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Sage\Accounts\2010\Company.000\ACCDATA\
11. There will be lots of files with a .dta file extension in here, simply scroll down to until you see QUEUE.DTA and select it.
12. At this point you could (but don't)  just delete QUEUE.DTA as this is the file that is locking you out from Sage and will be recreated when you next login and no company information will be lost at all. But rather than just deleting the file, it is better practice to rename this file to something different so that if it does break something, you can rename it back to the original and no harm is done.
13. Right click on QUEUE.DTA and choose rename.
    
14. Type in a new filename, in this case I'll rename it to QUEUE.DTA.OLD and hit enter.
15. Now try logging into Sage Account again and you should be all fixed.

I much prefer using VLC (free) to listen to my streaming audio and it’s possible to listen to the Radio 1 stream using VLC but it proved tricky to try and locate the URL of the live stream so for those that are struggling:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/listen/live/r1.asx

Depending on the options you selected when you installed VLC, you might be able to simply click the link above which should load in a new page and then auto-launch VLC and start playing Radio 1 live stream. If clicking the link above doesnt work, in VLC’s top toolbar, click Media and then Open Network Steam and simply paste the URL above into the window and hit play. Alternatively if you like keyboard shortcuts, just hit CTRL+N to open the network stream window and paste in the URL above.

The next time you want to listen to the Radio 1 live stream in VLC, open VLC as normal and then hit CTRL+1 to reload the most recently listened to stream.

Finally, one of the greatest features missing from Aplpe iOS devices ( iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) has now been made available as of iOS4.3…Home Share.

Home Share has been around in some guise for a fear or two now, allowing computers on the same network to see, browse and play music and videos from other iTunes Libraries on the network. What was lacking, however, was the ability for an Apple iOS device to see and stream this content whilst on the same network, it was restricted to OS X and Windows operating systems running the latest iTunes.

Let’s say I’d just purchased the latest XX Album in iTunes on my Mac Pro, if I wanted to listen to that on my iPhone 4 whilst in the garden (still connected to WiFi) I’d have to connect the iPhone up via USB and sync the new album to the iPhone. Not a big hassle but still inconvenient [hopefully one day soon Apple will pull their finger out and enable WiFi syncing of content to an iOS device, USB cables are so 2000].

The idea of Home Share is that now, any iOS device on my WiFi network can see, search and stream/play any content from another computer running iTunes on the same network, just what I’ve been after. Finally I can keep movies on my Mac Pro’s huge RAID hard drives and lie in the garden or in bed and stream a movie to my iPad.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it working, no matter what I selected in the iTunes preferences pane the “Shared” option wouldn’t appear on my iPhone or iPad.

I double checked on the iOS devices that I had entered the correct Apple ID in the Home Share settings:

Settings–>iPod–>Home Sharing

I made sure the iOS devices were updated to iOS4.3 and iTunes was on the very latest 10.2.1 and rebooted everything.

It still wouldn’t work. I powered on my Macbook Air and enabled Home Sharing on that and that instantly showed up on the iOS devices….so the iOS devices are behaving correctly but for some reason iTunes on my Mac Pro wasn’t playing ball. I checked to see if it was a firewall issue but the firewall on my Mac Pro is off (Firewall is handled by the router and TimeCapsule). Eventually I found out what I had to do….and felt like a right idiot for not spotting it sooner!

In iTunes I’d been check in the Preferences to “Enable Sharing” but what I had failed to spot in the Advanced menu was “Turn Home Sharing On”!! Err that could be the reason it’s not working. By default this option is set to be ON but I do vaugely remember turning it off last year when trying to debug some network latency issues with my Apple TVs.

In iTunes click on Advanced in the tool-bar at the top:

Select the option to Turn On Home Sharing [if it says turn Off Home sharing then your Home Sharing is already on and you have another problem, sorry]

Once you’ve done this, you should see a new Home Share icon in the side bar:

Click on that and then in the right hand pane enter your Apple ID (email address) and password and hit Create Home Share:

You should then be greeted with a screen saying that Home Sharing is now on and confirming the email address used to create the home share.  [NOTE Make sure this matches the email address entered on the iPod settings screen on the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch.]

Now on your iOS device, when you go into the iPod app and click on “more” in the bottom right corner on the iPhone/iPOd touch or Library at the top left of the iPad you should be able to see the new Shared section and select the library you just shared:

So if you’re having difficulty getting your Home Share visible on your iOS device:

1. Make sure your devices are on the same network, this is crucial! If you have multiple WiFi networks all devices that home share MUST BE ON THE SAME NETWORK. If, like me, you have an Apple Airport Extreme or TimeCapsule computers connect via ethernet cables are classed as being on the same network as the WiFi devices.
2. Make sure your iTunes is fully up to date, at the time of writing that is version 10.2.1
3. Make sure your iOS devices are fully up to date, at the time of writing that is version iOS4.3
4. Ensure you have entered the same Apple ID on both iTunes and iOS settings.
5. Finally, and most important, make sure Home Sharing is turned ON in the advanced settings of iTunes, see above screen shots.

Ping is the new social networking side of iTunes that lets you follow artists and friends to see what they are listening to, tracks they are buying, concerts coming up etc. Sounds great but how do you get your friends to find and follow you? This bit should be simple but in a very un-Apple-esque way it isn’t.

Fortunately you can just copy a link to your profile and send that to friends via email/twitter/facebook/etc.

First you need to launch iTunes and then click on the Ping icon underneath store:

You should now see your own personal profile page. All you need to do here is right click (ctrl-click) on your name at the top and then select “Copy Link” from the drop-down list. This copies a link to your profile onto your clipboard that you can paste into an email, tweet, etc

The link will look similar to:

http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=92779645 [This is my profile link btw]

and will open your web browser and should then automatically open your iTunes and navigate to your Ping profile page for others to easy hit the follow button.

Active Desktop Recovery error desktop.htt object doesn’t support this action

There was an option to click to restore your active desktop, but this was unable to restore the active desktop but eventually I found a solution that involved tweaking the registry a little:

1.Go to Run, type regedit and hit enter
2.Go here HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerDesktopSafeModeComponents
3.Select the value DeskHtmlVersion
4.Select the Decimal radial button
5.Change the value of 272 to 0
6.Most of the time it might take a few seconds for your background to appear, if not you might need to restart your computer.

UPDATE [21st Nov 2008] – Apple have released iPhone 2.2 software update which appears to fix all known issues with BMW bluetooth and iPhones. If you had no contacts syncing or bluetooth kept dropping the connection every 20 or 30 seconds then update to 2.2 and you should find it’s all fixed.

Ever since Apple brought out iPhone 2.0 software many of us found that the iPhone contacts that used to appear on the BMW iDrive or BMW radio display suddenly disappeared.

Since iPhone2.0 we all waited patiently for a fix from Apple, 2.01 and 2.02 failed to deliver but hopes were high when reports that 2.1 fixed a similar problem with Chrysler uConnect systems but again no change for BMW drivers.

Recently I configured my iPhone to sync contacts with my Exchange server at work and this PUSHed another 2500 contacts onto my iPhone and suddenly all my contacts appeared on the iDrive. I suggested to others this might be because I had multiple address books on my iPhone but this theory was soon disproved, I then suggested that it might be because I had a high number of contacts on the iPhone keeping which may change a timeout option somewhere on the iPhone or iDrive.

Some blog readers tested this theory and created 2000 fake contacts with no phone numbers but that didn’t work, then they tried 2000 fake contacts each with a unique contact number and this worked! By using contact names beginning with Z they appeared at the end of the iPhone and iDrive list but it did take a while to sync so many contacts with the iDrive. Another reader then tweaked this to get 2000 fake contacts each with the same phone number, the iDrive ignores any contacts that have the same telephone number and only syncs with one of them, so now we had 2000 Z-contacts on the iPhone all with the same number and this allowed ALL the contacts on the iPhone to sync with the iDrive but only showed ONE z-contact at the end. [Thanks to Rajesh and vants for their help with this!]

So far the feedback has been extremely positive with around 10 out of 12 people reporting a success.

To make life easy for you I have compiled instructions on how to add 2000 fake contacts to Outlook for the Windows users and Address Book for the Apple users.

Apple OS X Users:

It really couldn’t be simpler for you, simply download the following zip file:

DOWNLOAD FOR APPLE USERS – 2000 Fake Contacts for Apple users

Open the zip file and you should have a single vCard file, simply double click this vCard file and Address Book should spring into life and ask you if you really want to import 2000 new contacts.

Just click add and you’re all done, 2000 contacts z0001 to z2000 should now be in your Address Book. 

All you need to do now is re-sync your contacts with the iPhone via iTunes. [Note - if you use MobileMe to PUSH all your contacts from your computer to MobileMe and then PUSH them down to your iPhone it will still work just have some patience and check your phone after 10 minutes]

If, for neatness, you want to have the 2000 z-contacts in their own folder simply click the +plus at the bottom of the group pane:

then give the group a name:

and now click on the Last Import folder, in the middle Name pane click on the first z0001 and then press Apple+A to select all the entries and then drag them onto the new group you just created.

You can now jump past the lengthy Windows Instructions to read what to do next..

Windows Outlook Users:

Its a little trickier for you guys, it seems it’s not as easy to simply import 2000 contacts from one vCard download, so instead you need to download the following CSV file:

DOWNLOAD FOR WINDOWS USERS – 2000 Fake Contacts for Windows Users

Once you have downloaded the CSV file in Outlook click on File from the top menu and select “Import & Export”

Then select “Import from another program or file”

Then select “Comma Separated Values (DOS)”

On the next screen click Browse and navigate to where ever you saved the CSV file to (in my case it’s on my Desktop)

Leave the option to allow duplicates and click next

Select a destination for all your contacts, in general this will be your Contacts folder

but if you want to you can create a sub-folder in contacts called “z Contacts” or “Fake Entires” and save them in there for neatness but this is not a necessity and has no influence on whether the fix will work or not.

Note: You cannot create the subfolder once you’ve started the import wizard so if you want to, you’ll have to click cancel to exit the wizard then right click on your Contacts Folder and select “New Folder” and name it “z-Contacts” or “Fake Entries” then restart from step one:

That should be it now, you’ll be present with the final screen of the wizard where you can choose to map custom fields. Originally this was necessary but I’ve since added a header row to vants CSV file so the Wizard picks the right fields for Name and Phone number automatically, just click Finish. It should then start importing all the contacts, leave this going, it can take some time, on my machine it took a few minutes but that’s because my profile isn’t store locally, you may find it’s done much quicker.

You should all be done now, if you look in your contacts your should see 2000 Z-contacts all with the same phone number.

All you need to do now is fire up iTunes and re-sync them all to your iPhone.

[Windows users - notice how much easier this whole process was on an Apple perhaps it's time to switch! Just kidding, lets not turn the comments section into an Apple vs PC bash. I spent most of my time on an XP machine at work and manage my entire office's Windows workstations and just use Apple in my free time]

Next Steps (Apple & Windows Users)

Ok so if all went well above you should now have 2000 contacts at the very end of your iPhone contact list, all of which should have the same phone number. [Remember it doesn't matter if you have the 2000 z-contacts in a sub-folder or not]

That was all I needed to do, the next time it paired with my iDrive (2006 BMW M5) the contacts list appeared after a short wait HOWEVER, some people have said it’s best to keep the iPhone from sleeping whilst waiting for the initial sync to happen and some have said they had to delete the iPhone-BMW pairing and re-pair, so lets be safe and do both.

Delete the pairing – On you iPhone go to Settings->General->Bluetooth and if you see BMW##### [where there #'s are the last 5 digits of your car's chasis number in case you didn't know that] click it and select unpair. Now go to your iDrive (or prof radio if you don’t have iDrive) and select info sources/settings and find the bluetooth page (it differs depending on software version, etc but I’m sure you know where it is) and delete any pairings for any phones you have in there to be safe. Now go through the whole re-pairing procedure again, I will try and post a video on how to do this with iDrive as a few have asked but until then just follow the manual.

NOTE – If you find your iPhone contantly connects and drops the connection via bluetooth then you may have another problem for which I don’t have a solution just yet.

Keep the iPhone awake – Once you have paired the car will try and connect with the iPhone and sync the contacts, if you go to the communications tab of the iDrive (push and hold up on the iDrive controller for 2 seconds) and try and browse A-Z it will probably say “Please wait” with a little clock. Now here’s what some say is important, whilst that is showing you need to open the contacts app on your iphone and just sit there scrolling the contacts up and down randomly to simply keep the phone from entering sleep mode.

Wait a few minutes (up to 5mins lets say)…..DONE?

Did it work for you? Your comments are much appreciated on this matter and many others reading this thread may benefit from knowing what combination of iPhone, software version, model, year, etc you have.

Good luck!

I was recently asked or help with a problem opening links from emails in Outlook Express. It seemed that clicking web/url links in an email didn’t open the default browser and load the page, it just did nothing.

Fortunately there was an easy fix [for those using Internet Explorer as their default browser at least]:

1. Click on the Start button in the lower left corner
2. Near the bottom right of the Start Menu you should see “Run…”, click that
   [This should then bring up a black window with some text in?]
3. In that window type the following (without the quotation marks)

   1	"REGSVR32 URLMON.DLL"

   once you have typed the above in hit return key.

4. A small window should popup saying
   “DLLREGISTERSERVER in urlmon.dll succeeded”
   Click OK in this popup window.
5. You can now close the black window that opened up after Step 2.
6. Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools in the top menu and then select Internet Options from the list.
7. Once it has opened the internet options pages, along the top you should see various tabs, click on the tab called “Programs”
8. There should be an option in there to check that Internet Explorer is the default browser. If it is ticked, untick it, hit apply then re-tick and hit apply again. If it is not ticked just tick it and hit apply. Either way you need this option ticked but if it’s already ticked you need to untick and then retick it to make sure.
9. You may also need to click on the “Advanced tab” and see if there is an option to reset internet explorer settings at the bottom, if so click that too and hit ok to close the settings pages.

Now reboot the computer, once rebooted try opening Internet Explorer first and if it prompts you that it is not the default web browser you should click yes to make it default. Next open Outlook Express and see if that has solved the problem with the links in emails.

Method 1 – Create from Scratch

Right click on the desktop and select New -> Shortcut:

You will then be asked for the location of the item for the shortcut. Ordinarily you would just type http://the_url_you_want/ here but that would cause the page to open in your system’s default browser which is not what you want. Instead, copy and paste one of the following depending which browser you want to force the shortcut to open in:

To force open a URL in Internet Explorer:
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” http://url_you_want

To force open a URL in Firefox:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” http://url_you_want

After copying the blue text above you simply past that into the item location field, replacing the “url_you_want” with your chosen url. For example, if you had firefox set as your default browser but wanted to have a shortcut to http://blog.scoopz.com/ that always opened in Internet Explorer it would look like:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://blog.scoopz.com

Method 2 – Modify a shortcut to the browser

What if you want to open in a browser other than IE or Firefox (Opera or Safari, etc). You can acieve the same result as Method 1 by first creating a shortcut to the browser program itself and then modifying this shortcut to include the URL or web page you want.

Click on Start, Programs and find the browser you wish to use. Click and drag the icon for the browser to the desktop from the Programs menu whilst holding down the CTRL key.

You should now have a shortcut to the browser on your desktop. In this example I have chosen Internet Explorer (see icon to the left).

Next right click on the shortcut you just created and select properties from the popup menu. This should then load the shortcut’s properties page.

All you need to do now is click on the target field in the properties page and scroll to the very end (or hit the End Key on the keyboard). You now need to type the URL that you wish to open at the end of this field, in the example to the right I have chosen http://blog.scoopz.com and appended this to the end of the target. Leave all the other settings the same for now and that’s the new shortcut done.

From this shortcut page you can easily choose a Shortcut Key combination (CTRL+ALT+B, etc) to launch your shortcut instantly and choose whether to open the web page in a maximised, minimised or normal sized window.

UPDATE Jan 2010 – As several users have pointed out in the comments, the above techniques do not work if you are running Vista or Windows 7 as the path to internet explorer EXE file has changed. In this case or if you want to apply the above to other browsers here’s what Xygris recommends:

For those with other browsers, different operating systems or just updated versions with different paths try just copying the shortcut from your start menu to your desktop (via drag & drop) and them appending the new shortcut with the URL.

Thanks for the heads up Xygris.