Todd Taylor's Blog - Geek Tips

Stealing Microsoft Icons

Todd M. Taylor — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 19:13:10 GMT

Ok, ok... it's not stealing because Microsoft said we can do it! If you've ever wondered if you could use the icons in Visual Studio for other applications, apparently you can: Brad Abrams Blog: Standard Microsoft Icons

Disabling Acrobat in Outlook

Todd M. Taylor — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:33:09 GMT

One of the most highly annoying *features* of Adobe’s Acrobat 7 product is that it installs itself in all of the Microsoft Office applications whether you want it to or not and there appears to be no easy way to stop it. If you use Adobe Acrobat, Outlook has a Send as PDF button on the toolbar. To remove the button, you need to disable the COM addin.

Go to:

HKEY LOCAL MACHINE
   \Software
      \Microsoft
         \Office
            \Outlook
               \Addins
                  \PDFMOutlook.PDFMOutlook

Change the LoadBehavior value from 3 to 2. Restart Outlook. The PDF functions will still be available in Word and the other Office programs. The same registry key appears to exist for Word, Excel, and Access as well. I haven't figured-out how to remove Acrobat from Visio though.

Doing a Hard Reset on the Motorola MPx220

Thu, 19 May 2005 15:26:53 GMT

Well, if you’ve owned the Motorola MPx220 SmartPhone for any length of time, you know it has its fair share of bugs. Sometimes you might be convinced that a hard-reset is the only solution to some of the phone’s problems. According to a post on the Microsoft.public.smartphone newgroup, this is how you reset the phone:

To do a hard reset, hold down the round blue button while turning it on. It will then ask if you want to reset it Make sure you remove the SD and sim cards to make sure they won't get wiped-out. Some have said it will wipe both cards if inserted, but others say it's only the sim card that gets reset. I just pull them both to be sure.

Motorola MPx220 Update

Todd M. Taylor — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:41:23 GMT

The problem with my new MPx220 microphone not working started driving me nuts because it was happening on every call. To me, having to switch to the speaker phone was not an acceptable work-around to a $300 phone not having a working speaker! (I also found-out that the caller on the other end gets a really loud "beep" sound when my phone is switched from the microphone to the speakerphone.) Before my 30 day return policy was up, I took the phone back and exchanged it. So far, my new phone hasn't had this microphone problem, but I have it configured differently so I'm not sure if the old phone was really broken?

With the new phone, I configured ActiveSync to sync with my company's Exchange server on 4 hour intervals instead of having the phone sync every 10 minutes. I don't use my phone to receive emails, I just like the Exchange calendar sync feature, so I don't have any real need to have the phone constantly syncing.

I feel that by having the phone sync every 10 minutes, there is a pretty good chance that when a call comes-in or when I make a call that the phone may be in the middle of performing a sync in the background and creates a problem that prevents the microphone from working. Another idea regarding the cause of the problem is that since the phone is running the Windows Mobile OS, perhaps there is a memory leak somewhere and after a full day of making calls to the Exchange server, things start malfunctioning and must be fixed by a reboot (the solution some propose to *solve* this problem.) Rebooting seemed to be a good way to fix issues in previous versions of Windows!

One other advantage I've found to setting the sync interval to 4 hours is that any speakers that are near the phone don't pick-up the signal that the phone emits when it's attempting a sync. Our Cisco Avvid phones at work buzz and hum all day long if the MPx220 is syncing a lot, and that got really annoying, not to mention that it just seems like a health risk!

Motorola MPx220.. Smart or Dumb Phone?

Todd M. Taylor — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 15:42:24 GMT

The company I work for recently decided to get a bunch of the new Motorola MPx220 SmartPhones per the suggestion of one of my co-workers who had owned one for a while and liked it. At first, I didn’t want to give-up my boring, simple Sanyo phone because it worked well as a phone… something that seems rare these days with mobile phones.

My first impression of the MPx220 was “Wow!” It’s a camera, it’s a PDA, it’s an MP3 player, it’s a video recorder, and last but definitely least, it’s a phone. I must say that I really like the phone’s ability to sync with our Microsoft Exchange email server. It’s great being able to pull-out my entire calendar, contact list, or even email pretty much where ever I am. It was also very nice to not have to type-in all sorts of names and phone numbers like I did on my previous phones.

I find the user interface pretty easy to use and well laid-out. Considering all the things this phone does, it must’ve been quite a task to design a user friendly UI. In addition, seems like there are quite a few free downloads out there to help you design your own UI if you so choose.

I haven’t had any time to tinker with the Windows Mobile 2003 OS as of yet, and I probably won’t… I don’t want to break it! It does look like many others are tinkering though… I’ve seen various forum posts of people trying to adjust speaker volume issues and the like by editing the phone’s registry.

One simply feature that I love (in addition to the Exchange syncing) is that the phone has the ability to automatically switch between a regular sound profile and a meeting sound profile if there is something scheduled in your calendar. In other words, if you have an 8:00 AM meeting in your Outlook calendar and have the sound ‘profile’ set to ‘automatic’, the phone will automatically change to the ‘meeting profile’ at 8:00 AM. The meeting profile is set to ‘vibrate’ by default, but you could change that to no ring or a quite ring if you want.

Now for the bad part. For all the cool features this phone has, the one thing it seems it’s not good at is being a phone! On my second phone call, the person I was calling couldn’t hear anything I was saying and hung-up. After doing some research online, many people have problems with the microphone not working (amongst many other problems.) Most seem to say that restarting the phone fixes this… but who wants to restart their phone daily? I found that if I quick switch to speakerphone, I can still talk to the person on the other line, but that’s not an acceptable solution to me. Hopefully this won’t become an ongoing problem.

Overall, if this phone is a sign of things to come, I’m pretty impressed. As the technology improves, it’ll sure be nice to not have to carry a mini camera, Palm Pilot, and a phone! However, if you have a very low tolerance for things not working as they should, don’t get one yet or you’ll go nuts :)

Microsoft Word 2003: Page Numbering and Landscape Pages

Todd M. Taylor — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 21:48:18 GMT

Microsoft Word has got to be one of the most frustrating applications on the planet. It typically takes me hours to figure-out how to do things that I would think should be simple, such as having a document that contains portrait and landscape oriented pages which all contain a footer with consecutive page numbering.

To change one or more pages in a document from portrait to landscape orientation, select File > Page Setup… and then click the Margins tab. If you select the This Page Forward option under the Applies To area, all pages after the current page will be rotated when you select the landscape orientation.

That’s all well-and-good, but if you have your pages automatically numbered in the footer, switching one page to landscape orientation also creates a new Section in the document and starts page numbering over from 1. Argh!

So, what to do? Well, where there’s help, there’s hope. After creating a set of landscape oriented pages, select View > Headers and Footers. Select the footer of the first landscape page and make sure the Link to Previous button is not selected.

Figure 1: The Header and Footer Tool Bar

Then click the Format Page Number icon (the one with the # symbol and the hand as shown in Figure 1) and select Page Numbering > Continue From Previous Section radio button as shown in Figure 2. That’s it!

Figure 2: The Page Number Format Window