Then, this afternoon, it suddenly hit me after I read the error message properly. It was another “access denied” problem, and the target file path was given in full in the message.
The cure is exactly the same as the one for Outlook. Navigate to the folder WLW is trying to write to, right-click it, click Properties, click Security tab, click Edit… select the Home Users group, and make sure the Full Access option is ticked.
Click OK to exit all the dialog boxes, restart WLW, and it should work.
Incidentally, I checked all the folders in my “Users” folder and all of them had been set so that access could have been denied if any program had attempted to write to them. I suggest you go through the same routine outlined above for all sub-folders inside your “Users” folder.
Windows Live Writer works fairly well with Windows 10, though it does have an annoying problem with the cursor not wanting to stay where you drop it with the mouse.
Here’s another problem you’ll probably encounter in Windows 10. For no apparent reason, Outlook throws up a message that you do not have permission to access your .pst file.
I’m not aware of changing anything – I just rebooted and Bam! Outlook didn’t work anymore.
The solution is simple. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the file specified in the error dialog. Right-click it, and select Properties.
Click the Security tab, then click the Edit… button. Click on the Home Users group and put a tick in the Full Control checkbox. Click OK to close the Edit… window, then OK again to close the Security dialog. Click OK to close the original error dialog.
Outlook should work properly now.
Note that you must do this for ALL the .pst files if you want to send from different accounts. All of them are likely to deny access until you give full control.
WARNING: The program called Task Layout was recently updated (early 2016) and the ZIP file contains a virus (Bitdefender alerted me). The authors – System Goods – did not see fit to reply to my request to confirm whether or not this was a false positive, so I have to assume that they know it contains a virus. A decent company would fall out of its tree if someone reported such a thing to them.
Do not install it under any circumstances. I have removed the old version from my machine.
Aaaand another thing… Windows 10 installs updates and reboots without much warning. Unlike Windows 7 (which wasn’t very good at this anyway) Windows 10 makes no attempt whatsoever to restore your desktop open apps to anything like what they were before the reboot.
While I was looking for a way of saving my icon layout I came across a small application which saves your desktop layout so – at the click of a button – you can open all the programs you use regularly in one go.
It’s called TaskLayout and it doesn’t have to be installed. It doesn’t even have a presence you can show other than an icon in the system tray. You have to right-click that icon and choose either Save Layout or Open Layout. It’s as simple as that.
It isn’t free, like ReIcon (the icon layout program), but it is very effective.
NOTE THE ABOVE VIRUS WARNING – DO NOT INSTALL THIS PROGRAM.
Note that this is an old post. Windows isn’t so bad with this these days (2022).
All versions of Windows have had an annoying feature whereby changing the screen resolution – and that includes when you’re updating your graphics drivers – the layout of your icons gets messed up. It’s already happened a couple of times with Windows 10, so I did a bit of scouting to see if there was anything out there which can save the layout and then restore it if needs be.
It runs without having to be installed so it doesn’t make any changes to your system. It downloads as a .zip file containing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and all you need to do is copy the ReIcon_x64.exe file to a folder on your hard drive. When you run it, it creates two additional .ini files in the folder you saved it to (for that reason it’s better not to copy it straight to your desktop).
When you run it you get the window shown above. All you have to do to save your layout is click the Save Icon Layout button (the one which looks like a disk), and it creates a file. If your icons get messed up, click the Restore Icon Layout button (it looks like a clock face) and they all go back to their original positions.
It works with all Windows versions from XP through to Windows 10. It’s free, too.
Well, Windows 10 is here and I downloaded my upgrade as a result of being part of the insider programme. Installation is actually very straightforward, but not entirely trouble-free.
Windows 10 still has issues with NVIDIA drivers – even after supposed “fixes” by NVIDIA it still has them. I got round it by doing a clean install of Windows 7, upgrading immediately to Windows 10, then letting Windows Update do its thing. Even that wasn’t exactly plain sailing, but the drivers eventually installed properly.
A much bigger problem was the fact that Outlook stops working properly after you upgrade. You might not notice right away, because all your email accounts test successfully and you can still receive mail. When you try to send, though, you get the following message:
Error message: ‘DOAADI – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13): ‘Cannot connect to the network. Verify your network connection or modem’
I was pulling my hair out for a while, thinking that I’d got a crucial setting wrong in my account settings, even though I have them all written down and have used them before. After restoring my original Windows 7 image and double-checking, I was convinced that it just had to be a Windows 10 issue. And so it was.
After a bit of searching it appears that others had experienced the same problem. The solution which worked for me is as follows, and it involves running Windows’ system file check utility. In Windows 10, right click the Start button, then click Command Prompt (Admin). Type the following (including the space) and hit ENTER.
sfc /scannow
Once the scan completes you should be able to send emails again. It worked first time for me, though some sources suggest you may have to run it several times.
The reason for this is that Rewire Security changed the lifetime subscription agreement terms and then ignored my email when I sought clarification. Bad service equals bad product in my view.
Added bonus I found was that the Pro Pod doesn’t go drawing straight lines across lakes and rivers if it loses sight of the satellites.
In the past, I’ve played around with various GPS logger apps on my phone. One of the drawbacks to these is that if you want to track something when you’re not present, you have to leave your phone with (or in) whatever you want to track. Of course, you also have to wait until you can get your phone back, download the log file to computer, then fiddle with Google Earth to display the route. There are other apps which allow remote monitoring, but you still have to be separated from your phone and can’t therefore monitor properly. I thought about buying another phone, but that was going to cost surprisingly more than I expected, and carried its own drawbacks and limitatons. So I started looking at various devices on Amazon.
Before I continue, a word of advice: NEVER trust Amazon customer reviews. The people who fill out most product reviews (on Amazon or anywhere else)are idiots – that’s the subject of another article – and what they write is frequently a product of their own inability to operate whatever it is that they bought. Unfortunately, if some twat can’t figure out how to turn something on, then posts a review along the lines of the following:
Started to set this up and got a few texts on activating but can’t go past this. It won’t let me. Got a star because it turned up!!!?
Im still trying to figure out the set up.
Absolute rubbish.
Does not work, instructions extremely poor.
And so it goes on… well, you can’t help wonder if you should buy the product or not when you read this kind of thing. I turned to Ebay instead, and it was here that I came across the Rewire Security TK 102-Nano tracker. I was initially suspicious, because it looked like some of those I’d seen on Amazon, but the description made it clear that it had UK firmware and was an official Rewire Security product (a British company). The Ebay trader selling it was called “ematrading”, and the surprising thing was that although Rewire Security sells the unit for £54.99, ematrading (an official Rewire reseller) was shifting it for only £31.99. So I sent for one.
It arrived next working day in a sturdy box with various accessories. As you can see in the photo, the main unit is tiny. Accessories included in the box were:
charging cradle
mains USB charger
USB charging cable
plain battery cover
magnetic battery cover
waterproof pouch
manual and quick start guide
CD with software
The package also includes a pre-activated pay-as-you-go SIM card from Lycamobile. You have to remember that the device is essentially a customised mobile phone, and it has to be able to “phone home” on a regular basis. It has to use a 2G card, and this detail seemed to be something which was catching some Amazon reviewers out.
The Lycamobile SIM card comes with a telephone number – this becomes your logger’s identity. Set up was simple after that using the quick start guide. The first thing you have to do is charge the batteries for 8-12 hours (though they charge normally in much less time). While this is happening, you have to top up your SIM card (I put £20 on mine and got £5 extra free). The card then fits into the logger, and the battery goes on top of it.
The logger then takes a few minutes to identify all the satellites available to it (constant green LED while it is searching, blinking LED when it is ready). At this stage it is ready to use in SMS Tracking mode. All you have to do is call the logger’s number from your smartphone and it replies with an SMS containing its current coordinates and a Google Maps link. Clicking the link opens Google Maps with a pin marking the logger’s exact position to within 5 metres.
However, Internet Tracking mode is the really impressive feature. To configure it you need to download the Rewire GPS app to your smartphone. You add your logger as a named device using its phone number, and your smartphone number as the authorised user ID. You can now go into the Live Tracking Setup screen and send various messages to your logger to set it up how you want it – most importantly, you can choose a logging interval of one point every 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, or one point every 10 seconds. Obviously, if you choose a long interval then you will not see all the twists and turns of the journey.
Setting up Internet Tracking mode on your computer is also very simple. You need to set up an account at GPSLive (it only takes a few minutes to do this). You have 7 days after that to email GPSLive with your IMEI number to activate a lifetime subscription. All of this is free. All you then have to do is log into GPSLive and you can see what your logger has been doing.
The image above shows my activity over several lessons (the “P” pins indicate where I was stopped either on lessons or in traffic). The image below shows just one time slot, where a pupil was picked up at home but dropped off in the City Centre. I managed almost a whole day on a single battery charge, so that gives an idea of how it performs.
Note that the logger only sends data when it is moving, and it drops into standby when it is stationary (bear this in mind when you are setting it up).
GPSLive holds your data for 90 days, and you can download it as GSR, KML, or GPX files (these are standard GPS logger formats). You can load these into Google Earth if you want to and view your logged routes there.
The big question has to be: how much does it cost to run the logger?
Well, each text message costs £0.19 and it would be relatively expensive to attempt to monitor your logger continuously using that mode. Internet tracking, however, is much cheaper – a whole day, half of it monitored at one point every minute, and half at once every 10 seconds, ran out at about £0.002.
Your best bet is to use SMS only for set up commands – or tracking/locating where you only need a single point.
Note that all of this was achieved without having to install anything on my computer, and the only download involved the free app on my phone. That was when I got to wondering about the CD which comes with the unit. I could be wrong here, but It appears that “TK 102” refers to the chipset used by the logger, and you can buy devices which contain it from many different sources – most of them Chinese. To that end, the CD contains the software and documentation which runs this unit in what you could call the “Chinese mode” – at the very least, this means bad translations and software which appears quite crude. Perhaps this is why some of those reviewers had bad experiences? I don’t know.
What I do know is that you can have this thing up and running using proper English instructions written by an English company, and who are helpful over the phone (I called Rewire Security to register my device on GPSLive). Admittedly, some people might still have problems if they don’t understand some of the key concepts, but you certainly do not need to install anything from the CD. The app and GPSLive are polished products, and both appear to work faultlessly from what I’ve seen so far.
Battery life is poor on my unit
It can run for about 4 hours with a decent, fully charged battery. However, remember that a “decent” battery gets old and starts to run down quicker. You can buy replacements, so if you’re having problems just buy one.
It seems that some British firm has come up with a system whereby your PIN code(s) – that you use for your bank, etc. – can be set using emojis.
For anyone who doesn’t know, an emoji can simultaneously be any or all of the following:
a simple icon used to convey several words at once
a confusing icon of incomprehensible meaning outside Japan (and probably, even inside)
a way of extracting money from people who aren’t good with words, but who still have a smartphone
Quite frankly, anyone who uses emojis is not likely to be old enough to have a bank account (or if they do, they shouldn’t have). It’s bad enough when people intersperse forum posts or text messages with “lol” as a substitute for a full stop, or insist on typing “u” instead of “you”. At best, it’s just lazy. At its worst, it’s pathetic. But emoticons – or emojis, as they have evolved into – are a hundred times worse.
No one with a mental age above 15 is going to use them. They have their roots in Japanese culture anyway, and as you can see from the brief selection in the image at the top of this article, they are pretty much meaningless if you’re not a Japanese school kid. But even then, who the hell is going to need to use a small picture of a mouse or a puppy in anything other than the most pointless of communications? And what’s the difference between a yellow heart and red one? Jaundice, maybe? Yet people actually pay money for these damned things, even though in a more basically drawn form they’re already part of the Unicode standard (and that’s free).
Laughably, Androidcentral says:
With emoji, users could communicate using few or little words and still have their passion come through. One such example would be the “Reversed Hand with Middle Finger Extended” emoji that allows you to quickly express your emotion without having to say much.
Like I suggested above, anyone who needs to say that very often has a restricted mental age.
Anyway, the “service” being touted in that original article has 44 symbols, and it reckons that that’s better than just the 10 numbers used for bank PINs. Your first thought is why they couldn’t use the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks as well as the numeric characters, but this is where the dumbing down comes in:
David Webber, managing director of Intelligent Environments, said the system was designed to appeal to 15-25-year-olds.
“Why can’t financial service be fun and innovative?” he said.
The truth of the matter is that said 15-25 year olds really should be encouraged to learn to communicate properly, because once they get to 26+ pathetic cutesy icons aren’t going to cut it any more.
Mind you, the frightening thing is that with companies like Intelligent Environments around, maybe in 10 years’ time we’ll be living in a techno village of the damned, where people can only communicate like this. God help us.
As a footnote to this, the day after I updated it I was in contact with a pupil who has a her test coming up. She wanted an extra lesson somewhere, but my diary was full. However, I got a cancellation on the morning of her test and asked her if she wanted it. After confirming she did, and after me querying her choice of time and the fact she has the attention span of a gnat, she sent me this text message:
I can’t work out if the emoji adds any value to the text or not.
This article has had a run of hits late in 2021. Note that it is an old article, and I no longer use Flash movies on the site. I think the information is still valid, though. Also note that 1&1 is now known as IONOS.
I’ve recently been having a bit of trouble with one of the plugins I use on this site. It started when WordPress was updated. And note that this applies to a shared server with 1&1, though it may be relevant to others with different hosts.
The plugin in question displays videos (Flash movies, to be precise), and it isn’t the first time it has gone titsup. The only reason I was using it in the first place was that the uploader built into WordPress is restricted to the size limit for PHP file transfers set by your hosting company. When I first came up against this several years ago my main concern was to get videos working and I didn’t really think about how I could change the basic settings. Since there is no upload size restriction using FTP I just used that.
Using the WordPress’ native uploader would be by far the preferred option, though, because using FTP means you have to install a plugin to display the video (well, you did when I first came up against the problem), then upload the video manually using your FTP client. A simple short code pasted into the article will display the video. Until the plugin stops working, that is.
I’d had enough of the 8MB upload limit on my server, so set out to do something about it. For anyone else who has run into the same problem – particularly if they’re using 1&1 as their host – here’s how to increase the maximum upload file size limit. Type the following code into a text editor (NOT a word processor – I use Notepad++):
Save it with the filename “php.ini”. Upload the file to the wp-admin folder of your WordPress site. And that’s it. The values here increase the limit to 32MB.
It’s the php.ini file that you will need to target whoever your host is. Some may not let you change it, but others might. The advice above is specifically for 1&1 customers.
WordPress is a powerful blogging platform used by about 75 million people around the world. At least half of those host their own sites rather than use the free WordPress.com platform. That’s because you can install various plugins and themes that the free option doesn’t allow.
Of course, freedom is always quickly followed by the scammers, spammers, and general scumbags, and a recent scare reveals that some smaller sites – probably run by people who don’t update very often – are being targeted.
As you are aware, I don’t allow comments on this site. Any form of live comments system (and that includes most forums) just attracts arseholes who think they can get away with saying things to others that they would get a punch in the mouth for if they tried it face to face. But probably the most common use of any system is to post URLs linking to (often illegal) pornographic material or, increasingly, terrorism-related sites. I don’t want any of that, so I’ve disabled commenting completely.
Unfortunately, though, this is still not enough. Those scumbags I mentioned are like dog-shit – once you get some on you, you can’t easily get it off again.
I installed some new security software recently and made an odd discovery. Although my site is secure, one infected link was discovered. It seems that an article I wrote about an examiners strike contained a link to the PCS Union website, and this was possibly infected with malware (well, the destination was, according to Google). It’s gone, now.
I’m not quite sure what to make of that. My anti-union stance is well known, as is my derision of any strike by PCS staff – intended, as these are, to cause the maximum amount of inconvenience and suffering to as many innocent people as possible. But the link was definitely clean when I first posted it.
Over the years, we’ve had about ten versions of Windows for PCs, with a further half dozen or so for business-oriented systems. I started out at home with Windows 3.1 (it originally came on a handful of floppy disks), then moved to Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and I currently have Windows 7 on my PC and Windows 8 on my notebook.
It’s sad when I look back, but I actually queued on the day of release to get Windows 98! However, as technology has improved – and not just on the PC – it is now possible to get the latest version delivered to your door within hours of its release, so you don’t need to be such an anorak any more.
Technology on the PC, though, has made getting hold of OSes extremely simple. My internet connection with Virgin is currently knocking on 200Mbps and I have easily downloaded the disk image for the Windows 10 beta versions several times from Microsoft (the same goes for Linux and other large non-OS files). It takes just a few minutes each time. I’ve been trying it out on a virtual machine using Oracle’s VirtualBox for a few months, and I like it.
The other thing to be aware of is that if you are already using Windows 7 or 8 (there is no Windows 9), Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for one year once it is released during the summer.
