I find the F1 (open online help) and Insert (toggle insert and overwrite mode) keys on a standard Windows keyboard useless; more often than not, I hit them accidentally and have to reverse their actions. If you use AutoHotkey, you can remap keys to do nothing.
F1::return Insert::return
Windows 7 Explorer only shows the last modified time of files and folders in hours and minutes, not seconds, i.e. hh:mm instead of hh:mm:ss. If you use the Properties dialog, you can briefly see the last modified time in hh:mm:ss but if you wait longer, the text in the dialog changes to the pretty useless "n minutes ago" and then a more useless "m hours ago". If you check the file or folder properties the next day, you can see the last modified time in hh:mm:ss again! This misfeature became a problem when I wanted to check the modified time of files created seconds within each other.
The workaround is to change the Long date format in your Region and Language from dddd, d MMMM yyyy to ddd, d MMMM yyyy, which stops last modified date format from changing in the Properties dialog. Note that Windows 7 Explorer's Date Modified column never shows seconds.
Reference to self: use "HH:mm:ss" for 24-hour time format and "dd/MM/yyyy" to ensure that day of month always has two digits.
Here is a procedure for quickly claiming a Myki reimbursement if you are clearly overcharged. Myki is the smartcard system used for public transport fares in Melbourne.
Assumptions: Your Myki card(s) is registered on the PTV site so that you can check your trip and charges, and you know your account PIN.
If you can't read pages in a CHM (Compiled HTML) file on a Windows 7 computer, you might have to "unblock" the file. Seems to be a security feature to prevent scripts running.
Thankfully, you only need to do this one time for the CHM file.
See longer write-up in StackOverflow.
When saving an attachment in Outlook 2007, you can create a new folder in your filesystem first. However, Outlook locks that folder, so you can't move or rename it. You can unlock that folder by ...
There's an extra method listed in Folder or drive lock after saving attachment or message: use drag-and-drop.
When you enter text in a cell in OpenOffice Calc, you might find that your text is incorrectly capitalized and you cannot correct it! For example, while writing a vocabulary list, I entered 'sun' and it was capitalized as 'Sun' (maybe referring to a certain technology company). If you type Ctrl+Z to undo this capitalization, all the text in the cell is removed, not just the capitalization. It seems that Calc's AutoInput feature is automatically capitalizing text before it is entered (unlike 'AutoCorrect', which makes the correction after the text is entered, so you can undo the capitalization). I don't know how AutoInput differs from AutoCorrect, and I haven't found AutoInput useful so I've disabled it using menu item Tools / Cell Contents / AutoInput.
How to enable or disable Javascript in MSIE7:
That's a lot of steps if you want test if your Web page works with and without Javascript! It's very annoying that Microsoft decided to call the feature Active scripting
instead of Javascript
, that you can't expand or collapse the nodes in the Settings tree, nor can you easily jump to the required node by typing the first few letters (the control jumps first to ActiveX controls … first)!
When you write or respond to a HTML-formatted message in Outlook 2003, and paste some text from another source (e.g. a Web page), the pasted text looks out of place because Outlook uses the string's original formatting, which is almost always different from the formatting in the message. If, like me, you find multiple fonts in a message ugly, you'd want to paste the text into the message without any formatting, as in MS Word's Paste Special command. However, when editing a message in Outlook 2003 in HTML format, the Edit / Paste Special menu item is disabled. According to this thread, it's only enabled if you use MS Word as your editor!
One workaround is to use GnuWin32 commands and a pipe: getclip | putclip. getclip outputs the unformatted string from the clipboard and putclip copies its input string back into the clipboard. Now, when you paste your text, it won't have any formatting.
I use MS Outlook 2003's rules to sort notification e-mail from a bug reporting system into different folders, one folder for each combination of product and major customer. Each message is sorted based on a keyword in the message subject or body. Sorting by product name easy because it is a sub-string in the subject. Sorting by customer name requires a rule to examine the body of message and find a string whose pattern is release: <version> <customer>. Here's a simple regular expression to match this string: release: ... name (assuming that version numbers are always in the form x.y).
But I got ahead of myself. After a fruitless half an hour, I realised that Outlook 2003 rules don't support regular expressions, nor do they support wildcards, for pattern matching. If you can find a reference, please send it to me.
Rather than spend more time hacking a VBA script, I just created rules that matched the product name in the subject and the customer name anywhere in the body of the e-mail. These rules work almost all the time, and only fail when someone enters the customer name somewhere in the body of the e-mail, which is different from the release name generated by the bug reporting system.
When you insert a new page in MS Visio 2003, the page added in the right-most position, after all other page tabs. This behaviour is different from MS Excel, where a sheet is added before the current sheet. Visio's behaviour is annoying because after I create a new page, I have to move it to the position I want.
It seemed like a simple job: print Gantt Chart of my project such that the time scale fits on one page in Microsoft Project 2007. Below is a picture of what I wanted to do:
+------+ |Page 1| +------+ |Page 2| +------+ |Page n| +------+
Yet MS Project 2007 always printed the final milestone on an even page, so that I ended with twice the number of pages:
+---------+-------+ |Page 1 |Page 2 | +---------+-------+ |Page 3 |Page 4 | +---------+-------+ |Page 2n-1|Page 2n| +---------+-------+
A hack by Pak K. was to shrink the view such that the scale in the top tier of dates in the Gantt Chart is in quarters. A related hack I found is to specify only one tier in the Timescale dialog (select menu item Format / Timescale).
The notes in Print a view on-line help suggests that when printing, the timescale should be scaled down little to fit a small amount of overflow, but that is not the case.
An annoying feature in Microsoft Word 2003 is that the default setting for the Reviewing toolbar is Final Showing Markup, so that all changes in your documents are highlighted when you open it, even after you accept all changes and saved the document previously. The solution is to unset your Security option Make hidden markup visible when opening or saving.. See How to turn off annoying MS Word Features, 'Change Default for "Show Markup" Box' for this and other solutions to Word annoyances.
How to create a UML composite state element using Sparx Systems' Enterprise Architect application:
The selected state element is converted into a composite state element (the image has a infinity symbol) with its own state machine diagram (check the Project Browser). Now you can draw a transition line to and from this composite state and include it in state transition tables.
Annoyingly, Enterprise Architect's on-line help describes a composite element but doesn't show to make one!
Microsoft Visio 2003 doesn't provide keyboard shortcut for the user to resize a shape instance. You have to use the mouse pointer or (shudder) enter the required height and width of the shape in the Size & Position window.
Vista has a Memory Diagnostic Tool which you can turn on to test your computer's memory when you restart it. Once it is enabled, this tool starts every time you restart your computer. Be warned: the Vista help system doesn't explain how to disable it!
After some Web searching, I found this tip:
- Open command prompt as Admistrator: by typing in start ''cmd'' right click the .exe file and then clicking on adminstrator. - Then typing in the console: ''bcdedit /bootsequence {memdiag} /remove'' press enter, after that you can restart your com. and it wont start
If want to save an e-mail message in HTML format in Microsoft Outlook 2003, you may find that Outlook, unlike MSIE or Firefox browsers, only saves the text in the message but not any of the embedded images or attachments. Worse, Outlook doesn't warn you that it is not saving the entire message.
Another annoyance is that if you try to save an image in the message using the context menu item Save Picture As, then you can only save using BMP format.
This is way annoying. I installed an OpenGL game on my Asus notebook and it ran abysmally. When I tried to test the OpenGL interface with glview, that program crashed. The ATI's Catalyst Control Center (CCC) reported that OpenGL Version was Not available
.
It turns out that I have to update the driver for my notebook's ATI Mobility Radeon X1700 card and enable OpenGL support. ATI does not support any Mobility Radeon cards but I found an updated driver on the Asus site. Then I used Mobility Modder tool and it enabled OpenGL. Now my system has OpenGL version 6.14.10.7275 and glview runs to completion.
Whew! Thank goodness Mobility Modder worked since I wasn't looking forward to hacking .INF files without knowing anything about configuring video adapters.
