Outlook issues

I thought I would document this one in the interests of others as it took several man hours (IT help, colleagues and me) to resolve.

We frequently scan bits of paper and email the PDFs to ourselves and others.

Suddenly about a week ago I suddenly wasn’t able to receive the scans from the MFD (multi function device- or big machine that copies, prints and scans) that is in the library. I could receive from any other machine but it was a pain to walk up to the other end of the building to do it. I logged a call with our IT people for help.

After a bit of testing it arose that I was the only one with the issue. My colleague in the desk next to me could get scans emailed from the same machine just fine. It was getting very weird. the first thing I thought of was the junk email folder but that was empty.

A bit more testing from IT at the exchange resolved that it wasn’t an MS exchange issue either but somehow the emails were getting auto permanently deleted. (Thanks Jeremy). If a scan was sent to me while I was shut down the email went to the web mail just fine so the issue was my local setup.

Then I  got worried.  Around the time the problem started there were several updates to key bits of software. I started looking at what I could uninstall and also looked around at any Outlook add-ons that I had.

All this testing was a pain to my colleague (thanks Aimee) – I had to change sites and was ringing her every 5 minutes to ask her to try sending me another scan from the questionable machine.

I don’t know what made me look but I found it.

In the “Junk email options” I had ticked ON “permanently delete suspected junk e-mail instead on moving it to the junk email folder”. Now I remember turning that on several months ago after seeing nothing but true junk in the folder and getting sick of deleting it. Clicking it off and getting yet another test sent proved it. The test went straight to the Junk folder.

The mystery is why Outlook suddenly decided that the MFD address was junk. Adding it to the exceptions has, hopefully, now solved it. But I am also now worried that there has been other emails that I have missed in the intervening months.

So this is a warning. However well you think Outlook is handling your junk email DO NOT be tempted to select the “permanent delete” option as “permanently” in this case does NOT mean “move to the delete folder” and you can’t see and monitor what Outlook is deciding is junk.

How many WiFi connections?!

Hubby was asked by son to “help” configure his and his mate’s Nintendo DS Lites to hook up to our home WiFi network. After much research (including one site which stated incorrectly that our router was incompatible)  we finally found the answer that worked on a router support forum. The key, we think, was that our network passkey had to be in ASCII not Hex. We chose the opportunity to strengthen our network passkey. We also protect our network by MAC address filtering.

Of course then we had to reconfigure every other connected device in the house.  I thought that I would document the list and the issues.

• 2 laptops running Windows XP- one using a Dell wireless utility- no problems so far a reboot didn’t fix (these are our work supplied machines).
• 1 XP laptop (our son’s) using a Belkin PMCIA slot wireless card.  The utility wanted a hex passkey so we entered a hex translation. We restarted the card by physically removing and reseating it, then it accepted the hex version of the passkey and connected.
• Tablet running Kubuntu Jaunty. A lot of problems. Turns out there is a documented bug where it won’t accept an ASCII passkey. Installing WICD worked here.
• iPhone- no problem
• Nokia E71- no problem
• Nintendo Wii- no problem
• 2 x Nintendo DS Lite- they started it

Occasional visitors (B-I-L and daughter) yet to be re added and tested:

• a laptop running Vista
• a laptop running Ubuntu 9.04

I know we could have more, e.g. if we had other internet connected gaming consoles, but I think this is a lot of WiFi networked devices for one small household. And this list doesn’t include the two desktop PCs that use cable for their networking (one is our media server running MythTV on Ubuntu 7.10).

How does your household compare?

How to: Tasks with notifications for iPhone

As much as I love my iPhone it has been as backwards step for me from my Palm Treo for certain productivity functions.

Top of the list was a todo or task management system that synced with Outlook and gave me an alarm when something was due.

Today I have that functionality but it isn’t perfect. As with most iPhone work arounds it involves third party web services.

I decided on the Toodledo app some time ago. It has a lot of functionality, was getting good reviews and has a third (fourth ?) party application that syncs with Outlook. Today Toodledoo updated their iPhone app so it uses the new iPhone 3.0 push notifications.

So my system involves:

• Outlook
• A Toodledo account
• The Toodledoo iPhone app version 1.5.0
• The Outlook sync from Chromatic Dragon (there is a warning on the Toodledoo site but I have had no problems.)
• An iPhone running 3.0

Once you have these things in place follow these instructions. The key things are to allow notifications on the phone when asked on startup and sync THEN go to the web site Reminders/Alarms page and select the iPhone as your reminder location.

I took some time to get this to work.

My problems were:

• I was creating a task with a reminder on the phone and not realizing that it the app only auto syncs on startup not exit.
• The task has to exist on the website.
• When I was getting to the point that I was about to give up I checked my account settings ON THE WEBSITE and realized that the time was set for 2 hours ahead of what it should have been. Once I fixed that my next test worked fine.

The other thing to know are that Toodledo has two service levels- free and pro. With the free account, such as I have, you only get one notification choice, i.e. iPhone or email or SMS, and one choice of alarm time- one hour before the due time. Don’t rely on the exact time – they state that its actually 1 hour +/- 5 minutes.

The other not ideal thing is that I choose to manually sync with Outlook. My Outlook file is vast and any auto syncing (including Google Calendar sync) was slowing it further. Between that and that fact that the iPhone app only syncs on startup I have to remember to consciously sync everything.

I would be interested to hear of other iPhone users experiences setting up tasks with Outlook sync and notifications.

Easy blogrolls

One of my 23 things colleagues has just started her own blog (Yay Anne). She was talking about how difficult it was to add her blogroll by typing them in one at a time. I remembered that I didn’t do it that way but had to then remember just how I did do it.

This is how.

In the add link section in the WordPress.com dashboard is an “Import Links” link. If you click on it you will see an option to import an OPML file either from a web address or locally.

To get your OPML file from Google reader go to “manage subscriptions” at the bottom of your feeds list. Then you will see an “Import/Export” tab. If you click the “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file” you can save all your feeds which you can then import to your blogroll. Unfortunately at neither end of the process to you get to choose a subset of your links to display. The only way would be to categorize your links or delete the ones that you do not want to show. A painfull process when I have 110 subscriptions.

I did mine from Feeddemon which allows you to select a particular folder to export. A very useful feature.

There is another way which Google Reader provides that you may see used. In the “Settings” under “Folders and tags” there is an option to make a folder public. If you do you will get a link “add blogroll to your site”. This gives a handy script for a widget which you could paste into a text widget to display a dynamic blogroll from just one folder. Except if you are using WordPress.com who do not allow javascript to be used for security reasons.

Sharing bookmarks and clipped posts

One of the things we want to be able to do as librarians is quickly and easily share our newest discoveries with our clients and each other. I wanted to add a display for my shared, bookmarked and clipped items to this blog.

Sharing from an RSS reader
Social bookmarking like del.icio.us is an obvious choice but how about from my feedreaders. Google Reader makes it easy providing an RSS feed for both starred and shared items. But I recently shifted to Feeddemon, a desktop reader because Google Reader cannot see firewalled feeds such as those generated by our internal wiki. Feeddemon has a “add to clippings folder” which acts much like “starred items” in Google Reader. The trick to sharing them was to synchronize with Newsgator – Feeddemon’s online partner.

Problems along the way
Initially I synchronized all my feeds making them available to myself at any computer. The trouble was that for some reason a great number of my feeds stopped updating all at the end of May. It was a busy time for me so I initially didn’t notice. A trawl through Newsgator’s support forums indicated I wasnt alone but that Newsgator were treating incidents on a one at a time basis. I wanted my feeds back quickly. When you use Feeddemon the request for an update for a feed comes from your own PC. When you synchronize via Newsgator they come from the Newsgator servers then are downloaded to the PC. Switching off synchronization updated my feeds again.

Resolution
However, thankfully, turning off synchronization doesn’t turn off synchronizing the “Clipping folders” (don’t ask me why). And there is a RSS feed for it (very hidden but they give you the URL in very tiny font right down the bottom to the page). There is one last step. I wanted to have one place where everything I bookmark online can appear and I use del.icio.us for items I come across not in a reader. I took the RSS feed for my del.icio.us bookmarks and the RSS for my Feeddemon clippings and added both to a  Google Reader folder. I went to (confusingly) “tags” under the Google Reader settings and there made that folder “public”. Then going to “view public page” for the folder gives me the RSS feed for the mashed up feeds which I could add to a widget to display in the sidebar of the blog.