Ask DACS Reported by Drew Kwashnak AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem. Q – Email provider is AT&T, formerly AT&T Worldnet, which has been bought out by SBC. AT&T does not provide Broadband in the area so using Verizon for internet and accessing AT&T Mail over the Web. There should be an AT&T discount on email since it is accessed over the web, but cannot find this facility. A – AT&T was bought out by SBC, and AT&T Worldnet and AT&T Dial became AT&T-Yahoo! It was recommended to call Customer Service. It was suggested that to avoid being put on hold, follow the options for "becoming a customer" or "giving them money". When you get somebody you explain to them WHY you are having a problem of being a customer and giving them money. Tell them they can either help you or lose you. This should cut off a whole lot of hold time and explain that you are not going to spend money with them anymore. Q – I have a bootable CD and I want to put some drivers into it and re-cut the CD. Neither of these solutions were going to work because the operating system was Ecom, not a mainstream flavor of Linux. A – The member who posed the question later sent a follow-up on how he successfully accomplished this. He used Brasero Disk Burner, standard on Ubuntu and other linux distros.
Q – I used to use Outlook Express and am now using the latest Outlook. In Outlook Express when I would make a new email it would automatically add that address to my addres book, Outlook does not. A – This feature is called "auto complete" and should be included in Outlook. FROM OUTLOOK 2007 HELP FILE AutoComplete is a feature which displays suggestions for names and e-mail addresses as you begin to type them. These suggestions are possible matches from a list of names and e-mail addresses that you have typed before, known as the AutoComplete name list.
Some things to keep in mind is that Autocomplete is not connected to the Addressbook and it can include names you do not have in your addressbook. Also, if you communicate with somebody who uses different email addresses or is prone to change their email address frequently, Autocomplete will try and pull up based on frequency or alphabetics, the most recent address may not come out on top. It would be better to add frequently used email addresses to your Addressbook and set Autocmplete to look in your Addressbook first. To insert an address to the addressbook, right-click on the person's name in the message header and select "Add to Outlook Contacts". Mozilla Thunderbird also has a feature similar to this. Q – Has anyone worked with post script support with Brother (CDW-9840) printers? I am trying to print the dot pages for a Live Scribe pen and it wants to output post script print jobs from the Live Scribe Pulse Print Manager application and Brother uses it's own implementation of Post Script (brscript). A – The Live Scribe pen uses an IR camera and the dots on the page acts like GPS coordinates. The dots need to be crisp and clear for the pen to recognize them. He wants to be able to print out the sheets as is needed. Unfortunately Brother's post script drivers and the Live Scribe Pen's post script drivers are not matching up with each other. Suggested to convert it to PDF, which "has not resulted in satisfactory results". Sounds like he'll have to call customer service and "explain that he is not going to spend money with them anymore." Q – What software to use to convert Word to PDF? A – Here is a list of applications which are able to open and convert Word documents to PDF
Q – Remote desktop software suggestions (preferrably free)? A – There is already a remote desktop applicaiton included in at least the Professional version of Windows, which works fine Mac to Windows and Windows to Windows. Linux also includes a Remote Desktop viewer in many, if not most, distributions. VNC is popular, but was suspected to not be free anymore. With a little searching, it was found that there is still a free version of VNC available. Actually there are multiple versions of VNC; RealVNC which offers a paid for version and a free version and TightVNC which is released under the GPL. RealVNC's free version does not run on everything the paid-for version does, it does not include Windows Vista and Server 2008 and Mac OS X (x86 and PPC). For pay options include GoToMyPC and Symantec's PCAnywhere and LapLink Everywhere, all of which cost money. Q – In Outlook 2003 a member set up a rule to color the emails from certain people, yet people with similar first names are also coming up colored as well. If the user puts in the person's last name only, it filters out but doesn't stay that way. A – This is a useful feature for situations like secretaries supporting multiple people so that at a quick glance can see which emails came from whom and is included in Outlook. At first was looked for under Tools and Organize. To accomplish this in Office 2007, go into Tools > Organize. This will open a panel in the Inbox with Ways to Organize Inbox. Select Using Colors and you will have the choice of coloring messages from a particular email address, or show messages only sent to me in particular colors.
As for the change not sticking, a suggestion was to compact the database. This will clear out the empty space in the database and may solve any index problems causing the color rules to not stick. This can be done by going into File > Data File Management > Settings > Compact Now. Some other organizing ideas that came up was to use a rule to dump recurring but not high important emails, such as news subscriptions and the like, into seperate folders so the important email will be in the Inbox. Alternatively can do the exact opposite, which is to take important emails from people you know and put them into their own folders. The down side of both of these methods is that it is too easy to not see an email that goes into the folders. Q – Considering purchasing fm transmitter to plug into the computer's sound card and transmit over a medium sized house, has anybody tried this and are there any recommended brands? A – The idea is to connect a transmitter to the computer in one spot, and speakers to a receiver elsehwhere in the house using FM or wireless. This is the same technology used in cars to play MP3 media players through the car's speakers. One thing that was brought up was that the band in which these transmitter broadcast are often on the upper or lower regions of the spectrum which are too far for car radios to tune into. Even some car radios only 10 years old cannot reach these bands. Another recounted a family member who had a device that used the wi-fi network to transmit wirelessly from the transmitter to the receiving unit where the speakers are plugged into. Unfortunately he uses cordless phones on the same 2.4 Ghz band and has to reboot the device after every phone call. Q – Any recommendations to TV tuner card to connect a computer and a TV. A – For Linux, the recommendation is Hauppauge, and to get the tuner card only, not a tuner and video card combination. Q – Back in February there was a question on backing up a WordPress blog. A – There is a plugin called wp-dbmanager which allows for automatically backing up the database on whatever schedule you set. It will save a copy of the backup on the web server and email you a copy. This handy plugin also automates optimizing the database, which needs to be done on a regular basis. This plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress extensions site, or for version 2.7 it can be found through the plugin manager. Q – What tools should I use to modify the contents of a bootable CD? A – At the March 2nd general meeting, I asked about tools to use so that I could modify the contents of a bootable CD and then create a new CD with these changed contents. Here is what I did using Linux (Ubuntu 9.10). Installed the ISO Master application from the Ubuntu Software Center. I used this to work with the .iso file created above. Just Remove the file(s) to be updated and then Add the new version of the file(s). Save the resulting updated ISO image with a new file name. Go back to the Brasero Disk Burner application and this time select "Burn image". Specify the new iso file named above. Done.
Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org. Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!
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