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?

Initially he thought it was just one of his Safari plugins but even after disabling all Safari plugins the [SP] still appears as shown in the screen shot below.

I suggested it could be to show that it’s a Secure Page hence the SP but it shows even on non-https pages and can clearly be seen on the basic vanilla Google homepage in the screenshot above.

If anybody is able to help shed any light on this please leave a comment below as he seems to be one of only a handful experiencing this strange problem.

UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, @benmarsh managed to solve it all on his own…he’d enabled the Debug tools in Safari and unchecked the option to “Use multi-process windows” so the [SP] stood for Single Process.

benmarsh Ben Marsh

Aha! [SP] refers to Single Process – I remembered I unchecked Debug -> User Multi-process Windows yesterday! D’oh!

Some YouTube users, myself included, are having issues when they upload a video to YouTube. Once the video has been processed the first few seconds are just grey/pixelated. Fortunately there is a simple solution…just add audio! I only get this problem with videos I upload to YouTube with no audio so I tried just adding a single 1 second audio sample at the start and reuploaded the file to YouTube. That resolved the issue.

Original upload without audio and hence faulty at the start:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

To fix this I simply added a 1 second sound effect from iMovie’s collection to the start of the video and reuploaded, works fine now:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Don’t waste time like I did trying to export from iMovie in a different format, that didn’t work either, adding a tiny audio clip seemed to be my only resolution.

Slice this up using Photoshop’s slice tool.

Right click to promote any autocreated (grey) slices to user (blue) slices.

File->Save for web and devices.

Select gif or jpg depending if graphics or photo based (respectively).

Saves images and html file.

Open html file in Dreamweaver, even though it LOOKS ok, if you upload this as is to MailChimp and send it, Gmail, hotmail and many others with break up the table layout. Try it and see! It’s very easy to tweak the HTML code to fix this, click read more to find out how.

At present each cell entry would look like:

<td>
<img src=”images/spacer.gif” width=”30″ height=”1″ alt=”">
</td>

But rather than specificy a blank cell and then put an <img> is as it’s content, we want to specify a cell with the <img> as the background to the cell and NO content (or at least not yet).

What you want to do is highlight the width=”xx” height=”xx” and CUT that (CMD-X or CTRL-X) then PASTE it in just after td

<td width=”30″ height=”1″>
<img src=”images/spacer.gif” alt=”">
</td>

Then after the height tag you want to add background=”img_you_want” tag. So just copy and paste the “images/image_your_want.gif” from the line below and then you’re left with:

<td width=”30″ height=”1″ background=”images/spacer.gif”>
<img src=”images/spacer.gif” alt=”">
</td>

Since we want the contents to be empty you can now remove the middle line simply leaving:

<td width=”30″ height=”1″ background=”images/spacer.gif”>
</td>

You’re done.

If you want to add text OVER the table background images you’d simply place it before the </td> tag.

<td width=”30″ height=”1″ background=”images/spacer.gif”>
SOME TEXT CAN GO HERE
</td>

Now when you upload your files to MailChimp to generate a newsletter it should display correctly in Hotmail, Gmail, etc without the table and background being mis-aligned and broken.

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.

I left them all downloading and updating but one, the Safari update, refused to work. It said I had insufficient access rights but considering I’m the only user and I’ve always been setup as an administrator this was strange.

I tried repairing disk permissions but that didn’t work. Then I thought perhaps it just needs to be restarted having just installed all the other updates so I dutifully rebooted and the same thing happened when I rebooted.

The Update Safari can’t be saved. You do not have appropriate access privileges. The installer package has been moved to the Trash. To try again, open the package from the Finder.

I checked the Trash and there was nothing in there so I had a root around and found an easy solution…using Finder to browse my hard drive I navigated to /Library/Updates/

and then deleted the Safari folder that was in there:

and then tried to install the Safari update again from the Software Update window and it downloaded and installed the update without a problem.

I knew I was typing my password 100% correctly so I thought it might be a strange cookie or cached file problem so I cleared Safari’s history, quit and restarted Safari but the same thing kept happening.

I thought Facebook might be having an few glitches but I opened up Firefox and it logged me in straight away.

After lot’s of hair pulling I finally found the reason I couldn’t log in to Facebook using Safari and I’ve been kicking myself for not realising sooner….I noticed Private Browsing was activated in Safari. My computer gets used by a variety of people during the day so when I come to do any online banking I sometimes turn on Private Browsing and am normally very good at remembering to turn it back off. However, on this occasion I had forgotten to turn off Private Browsing and that was the cause of Facebook failing to login and constantly cycling me back to the login page.

I know this seems obvious once it’s pointed out, and other sites sometimes pop up warnings stating Cookies are not enabled, etc which would normally prompt you to check Private Browsing options but Facebook give’s no warnings or errors in a pop-up or on the re-loaded login page.

I have since turned on Private Browsing and tried to log in to Facebook and it worked fine, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t working before but turning off Private Browsing was definitely the cure.

I tried several different options and plugins to try and fix this I even tried resorting to using a plugin to allow SMTP to send the notifications but none of them worked.

I then read this thread over on the WordPress support forums and on page 4, thanks to teknics there is a fix that worked instantly for me. Just a simple addition to my .htaccess file was all that was needed, if you alread have a .htaccess in place please be careful not to mess up anything else in the file as it could prevent your site from working.
Just adding the following line to the end of the .htaccess file was all that was needed:

I have checked the earlier email notifications I received before it all stopped working and my return path was listed as apache@iomart.com (where iomart are my host, aka Easyspace), after adding the line above to my .htaccess file my return path is now showing as webmaster@example.com and notifications are working ok. I’ve since it to be my actual email address of my account I use for my WordPress profile to keep things tidy and all is working well.

UPDATE - Several wordpress updates later and I stopped receiving notifications again and couldn’t figure out why. In Googling the problem I came across my own bloody blog entry and after removing the line above from my .htaccess file it all works again. So if you added the line above to your .htaccess file REMOVE IT if you’ve updated your WordPress installation.

I’m not sure why this works exactly but if you can shed any light on why forcing an extra parameter suddenly gets things working please do so in a comment below.

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!

Just connect up your iPhone and iTunes should announce that there’s an update ready and waiting.

I don’t really care what other bugs it fixes so long as my contacts will syncronise with my BMW iDrive via bluetooth…soon find out.

[30 minutes later]…Bad news for BMW drivers, iPhone 2.01 still doesn’t sync address book contacts with iDrive. When Apple mention numerous bug fixes with this version I’m not too sure which “bugs” they’ve fixed but immiediately the phone does seem to be more responsive. The horrible lag when you click on contacts before you could scroll through all your contacts has not gone but it is much shorter now, and after sending a few SMS, the keyboard lag seems to be gone now too.

I’m sure there will be many other fixes “under the hood” but to me and 1000′s of other BMW, Chrysler, Mercedes, Jeep, etc drivers out there, not fixing bluetooth connectivity issues with 2.01 was a big mistake.