Sync Contacts between Outlook and Gmail? —— Pre Owners take note!

As you may or may not be aware, the Palm Pre does NOT sync with Outlook.

It’s simply not built to do “Old School” syncing. This is all very well if you use Exchange or another enterprise email system but if you use a simple POP account and your contacts and calendar  are stored in Outlook then you’re S.O.L.

Palm’s recommendation? Move your email to Gmail. Thanks Palm.

Now to be more helpful…

Yes you can use Gmail, but you don’t have to move your whole email system to it. Just set it up as a conduit to sync Outlook to your Pre, and here’s how you do it;

• Get a Gmail account if you don’t have one already.
• Sign up for Gmail Calendar – or rather activate it once you have a Gmail account.
• Download the Gmail Calendar Sync (from Google)
• Download the Contacts Sync from WebGear.

Quite why Google gives us a Calendar sync but NOT a Contacts sync remains a mystery, however the nice people at WebGear have been kind enough to provide this tool. It’s still Beta but it’s Open Source so hopefully will improve over time.

Thanks Palm, for not giving us an option to sync with Outlook…

Using command line compression in Windows

After a long a fruitless search to use a command line option for Microsoft’s “Send To > Compressed (Zipped) Folder” I saw the light and found 7-zip.

7-zip is an open source compression tool that allows it to be used in a command line way as well as a GUI. Go to http://www.7-zip.org/ and download the latest version, then when you write a script, here is a quick and dirty example of a command line for the app;

“c:\program files\7-zip\7z.exe” a “d:\backup files\compressed.zip” “c:\working files\uncompressed.txt”

Multi App installer anyone?

In short http://ninite.com/ – word of caution. I’ve not tested it yet (neither has my buddy who recommended the site)… I will in the next few days but until then consider the site to be… from an untrusted source.

I had a quick look and it seems awesome. It contains lots of the standard tools I use and they claim to install on a standard use policy i.e. don’t send me emails, don’t crap all over my HD with stuff I didn’t ask for. Don’t trick me into installing your tool bar (thanks for the option!) etc. etc.

Will update when I’ve installed a few apps to see if it really is as good as it seems.

Removing Meta Data from Word Docs

Just had a client ask about this and after some digging found these little bits of wisdom, in order of usefulness….

• Turn off Track Changes. Click Tools/Track Changes. Look in the status bar at the bottom. If TRK is bold Track changes is still active. If it’s grayed out then it’s off. Remember to disable track changes save the doc, close Word, reopen and check to see if TRK is grayed out still.

• Microsoft also has a handy tool to remove all of this kind of data; TOOL - nice…

• Turn off Fast Save. Click Tools/Options. Then click Save. Uncheck the Allow fast saves click OK.

• Turn off Personal information. Click Tools/Options. Go to the Security tab. Then Privacy options, check Remove personal information from file properties on save.

Mat sent me another uber good link so I’m going to post that next.

Transferring large files

It’s happend on too many occasions that I need to move a large file to someone. Too big for email I would say is 10 mb or more. I know people send bigger emails than that but they shouldn’t and it’s lame. Email was never designed to move big files.

Besides it’s far more efficient to use FTP or something similar.

https://www.yousendit.com/cms/compareaccounts

This site was recommended by a client so I checked it out and used it and sure enough it’s good enough for me to put on my blog. So there you go. That’s the tip for the day.

Windows Password recovery

I can’t believe I haven’t added this. I guess because I just google it each time, but just in case Google ever goes away, here’s the link. I also can’t count the number of times I’ve had to download this tool because I give them away so frequently!

So the URL you need is http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm and you need to look about half way down the page until you get to see “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor“.

There will be several files you can download and I normally take the latest one.

You can burn the image on a Mac or PC, it doesn’t matter, just boot up on the Windows PC you want to blank the password on and follow the prompts.

Burning an ISO image on a Mac

I thought this would have been easy but apparently not …

So you get an ISO and you want to burn it to disk. You need to open up Disk Utility to burn it.

I found the most convenient way to do this was to right click on the file (or CTL-Click), Choose Open With >> Disk Utility.app

Once there, Click on the ISO file so it’s highlighted, then click on the Burn button at the top.

That’s it. It’s simple once you know how but coming from a Windows background, I expected the burn option when I right clicked the file, or to simply drag the iso file to my “Burn Folder”. If you do that BTW it will burn the iso FILE on the disk, not the contents of the image…. very helpful!

Outlook Autopreview

You know that view in Outlook where all emails have about 3 lines of the email content below the subject etc so you can scan them without having to open them? Well I had a client that wanted that for ALL emails not just unread ones. Turns out that this is the way to do that;

AutoPreview

Using AutoPreview, you can read the first three lines of messages from the main Outlook window without opening them.

To turn AutoPreview on, from the View menu, select AutoPreview. These same steps will turn it off if it’s on.

To preview the first three lines of unread messages only, follow the appropriate steps below.

Outlook 2007

1. From the View menu, select Current View, and then click Customize Current View.
2. Click Other Settings, and then click Preview unread items.
3. Click OK, and then, to close the View Summary window, click OK again.

Outlook 2003

1. From the View menu, select Arrange By.
2. Select Current View, and then click Customize Current View.
3. Click Other Settings, and then click Preview unread items.
4. Click OK, and then, to close the View Summary window, click OK again.

Outlook 2002

1. From the View menu, select Current View, and then Customize Current View... .
2. Click Other Settings... , and then click Preview unread items.
3. Click OK, and then, to close the View Summary window, click OK again.

In order to fully give credit where credit is due, I found this gem from the Indiana University Knowledge Base site, here – http://kb.iu.edu/data/ajwz.html

Thanks guys

Mac Startup Keys

OK so I’m feeling guilty about cutting and pasting so instead here is a link to the source;
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343
Enjoy

Labor Day Tips

I found several things I wanted to note down today.

First, which I perhaps should have known is how to turn off the crappy Windows Simple File Sharing. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to actually find it. Coming from a network admin role I always found it quite annoying when I tried to take ownership of a folder or simply setup sharing of a folder without Microsoft forcibly holding my hand.

This will help me tone down my frustration somewhat with Windows Hand Holding…

To Turn off Windows Simple File Sharing, simply follow these steps;

1. Click Start, and then click My Computer.
2. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options.
3. Click the View tab.
4. In the Advanced Settings* section, click to clear the Use simple file sharing (Recommended) check box.
5. Click OK.

*You should note that in my version of Windows XP Pro that I used this on, there was NO Advanced Settings, I just scrolled down the bottom and it was right there.

The second thing I wanted to write down before I forget is a list of useful Apps I’ve found over the last few weeks;

• TrueCrypt – a great Encryption tool for making disk images that you can mount when you need them. Works with Windows and Mac.
• Eraser – Simple file “shredding” tool – seems to be quite good but I’m still fleshing it out.
• FileZilla – awesome FTP utility that works with Windows and Mac.
• VLC – wonderful video playing tool for Mac. (and Windows) Includes all the decoders you should need unless you’re heavily into alternatives…