Clear stalled printer jobs from the printer queue

This is one of those special case solutions that is great when you need it.  Have you ever tried to print a job in Windows and it gets stalled in the printer queue?  You try to delete the job and it won’t delete.  You can’t print anything else until this stalled job is deleted and you can’t delete it.  The only thing that seems to work is to reboot the machine.  Well, someone has written a program that will clear these jobs for you.  It is freeware, works on Windows XP, Vista and 7, and is called Stalled Printer Repair and is available here.

Running Stalled Printer Repair

Running the program is easy, nothing gets installed (assuming you download the zip fie and not the installer), you just run the executable.  When you do, you get the following dialog box:

Click the Purge Print Jobs button and you are all done.

Could you do this without the program?

Basically, this program is automating steps that you could do yourself.  If you want to do them, here are the steps (from the Stalled Printer Repair webpage)

1. Make sure all print jobs are complete and that no new print jobs are being submitted.
2. Double-click Services in the Printer Control Panel and stop the “Print Spooler” service.
3. Open the C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32SPOOLPRINTERS in My Computer.
4. Delete all files located in this folder. Files in the Printers are named xxxx.spl, xxxx.shd where xxxx is a hexadecimal number. Files with .shd and .spl extensions are printer files.
5. Double-click Services in the Control Panel and start the “Print Spooler” services.
6. Re-print any print jobs.

Looking for what’s on the web – StumbleUpon.com

Are you a little overwhelmed with the amount of sites on the Internet and not sure what sites you would like to see?  There is a free webservice available that will make suggestions based on what you like and dislike.  It is called StumbleUpon and is available here.

Creating your account

On the website, you will need to create an account and set up some initial interests.

The StumbleUpon browser Add-On

In order to use StumbleUpon, you need to install their add-on, which is available here for Firefox and here for Internet Explorer.  This is what it looks like once you install it:

To get a recommendation from StumbleUpon, all you have to do is click on the Stumble! icon – a new website will appear in the window.

Refining the recommendations – thumbs up and thumbs down

To refine the recommendations,  you can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icon to indicate your interest in the site.  StumbleUpon will use that to refine its recommendations and will add all thumbs up sites to your favorites list.

If you thumbs up a site that StumbleUpon doesn’t have in its database, then the site will ask you for some information about it.

If you click on the thumbs down icon’s arrow, you will have some more advanced options.  This is from the stumbleUpon Help Center:

The thumbs-down button has a few advanced options if you click on the arrow next to it:

• Not-for-me = poor targeting. Use this whenever you receive something that you dislike or that does not match your interests.
• Report Spam = Use this option whenever you receive content that provides no value, no matter who the Stumbler is. If it’s something you personally don’t like, use the option above. If it’s content that no one, but the author of the page could possibly like, it’s spam. You may use this option for unsolicited requests to register, sites that look suspicious or contain scams.
• Duplicate Content = content that has been copied from another page with no added value from the original.  Examples would be news articles taken verbatim from a news site, photos taken from a photo site, re-uploaded videos on YouTube, online games re-hosted on another server, etc. Critique, satire, remixes of content from other pages are acceptable and should not be flagged.
• Block website = you can opt to block an entire domain, which means you will no longer receive any stumbles from that site again. You can unblock
• the domain at any time later if you change your mind.

Sharing with others

You can share sites with others via the toolbar.  You have three options:

• Sharing with your StumbleUpon friends
• Sending the site to someone via an email address
• Through Facebook or Twitter

Additional information on a site

If you click on the Info icon when you are on a website, you will be referred to StumbleUpon’s information page, which will show you things like which StumbleUpon users have liked this site, user reviews, etc.

Incorporating StumbleUpon results in searches

When you installed the add-on you were asked if you wanted to include StumbleUpon results in searches.  (you can also set this via the Tools button on the toolbar and selecting Toolbar Options and then selecting things from the Web Search section)

After activating the web search feature, your search page will have the StumbleUpon icon and yellow stars (the stars give an indication of how many StumbleUpon reviews there are).

Clicking on the stars will bring you to the StumbleUpon review page.

Modifying your favorites

You can always click on the favorites icon and get a list of your current favorites and modify them or delete them.

Updating topics

If you want to modify the topics that StumbleUpon uses, you can click on the Tools button and select Update Topics (or go to the website, sign in, and go to the settings screen).

Creating web pages – KompoZer

If you want to create HTML web pages, you can use a simple text editor like notepad to create HTML documents.  While that works, it can be extremely tedious to do that for any pages that are complex or long.  What would be really useful would be a free web editing program that has a lot of features.  I have found one called KompoZer and you can download it here.

Son of Nvu

KompoZer has its roots in another free editor – Nvu.  When development stopped on that program, KompoZer started with the Nvu editor and enhanced it.

Using KompoZer Views

When you start up KompoZer, this is the view that you will see.

The right pane will contain the web page that you are working on.  You can see it in four views.

• Normal
• HTML Tags
• Source
• Preview

Here is an explanation of the different views from a manual that I found online here:

Preview mode offers almost the same view as in a browser with the addition of rulers and sizing boxes. The main differences are that scripts do not run (so their effects will not be seen), links do not operate and the style for links does not respond to any class set. Tooltips do work however.

Normal view is very similar but here table outlines show and markers for named anchors appear.

HTML Tags view assists those familiar with HTML. There is a yellow marker for the start tag for all elements (end tags are omitted). Clicking on a marker selects and highlights the whole of the element.

This is normal view:

This is HTML view:

Source view will give you essentially a notepad editor.

Making A Page

Adding elements is pretty straight forward.  You choose the element from the toolbar and fill in the dialog box.

This is the dialog box to add an image.

All of the form fields can be accessed by the form field dialog (i.e. buttons, textboxes, etc.).

Inserting a table is very easy, just drag the mouse to get the number of columns and rows that you want.

Site Manager

KompoZer has a site manager that allows you manage all of the files in a website.  The confusing part to me was setting it up.  To do so, go to the site manager pane and click on the two computer monitors icon.

That will bring up the following dialog box:

For a local site, you just need to enter a site name and the publishing server – which in this case is a directory on your computer.

You can create as many sites as you want.

Once you have a site in the site manager, it will bring in all of the files and directory structure like this:

Stylesheets

KompoZer has a basic style sheet editor.  I’m assuming that you know what stylesheets are and how to use them.  If not, that will be a discussion for another day.

You can get to it by clicking on this icon in the toolbar.

The editor options are:

Create a new style by clicking on the palette icon.

Once the rule is created, then the other tabs will be active.

To use an external style sheet, you just need to click on the “internal stylesheet” name and then click the “Export stylesheet and switch to exported version” button.

If you want to link in an external stylesheet, click on the down arrow on the palette icon and select “Linked stylesheet”.

Inserting a Table Of Contents

From the Insert menu, you select Table of Contents.

This is what will appear:

You can also update the table of contents once it is created.

Validating the site

KompoZer has tools to assist you in validating the site under the tools menu.

Markup cleaner

The markup cleaner will attempt to remove redundant code.  When you select the tool, the following dialog box will appear:

Validate HTML

KompoZer links to the W3C validator service to validate the page (Unfortunately, I can not show it to you because of network issues).

The limits of KompoZer

KompoZer is very good at what it does, but there are limits to what it can do.  Specifically, if you are going to build a website with the following features/capabilities, you will most likely need an additional tool, or will need to purchase a more heavyweight editor.

• An server side scripting (for example changing what is on a web page based on what the user enters)
• Any website that is going to read or write to a database
• Client side scripts (i.e. JavaScript) will not work directly in the tool.  You need to select the Browse mode to bring up an external browser to see how JavaScript will work.

Conclusions

If you are looking for a basic webpage editor, you can do a lot worse than using KompoZer.  I found it takes a little to get used to but that’s true with all tools.

Turning down your monitor at night – f.lux

Are you one of those people that work at night on their computer and notice that their screen is very bright?  There are theories that this isn’t the healthiest thing for you – that the bright light late at night can mess up your sleep cycles.

Whether you believe this, or just want a less harsh computer screen at night for your eyes, there is a program that you can install on your computer that does this and it is here.

How it works

Here’s an explanation from the website:

Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?

Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?

During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.

f.lux

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

The program will adjust your computer screen based on the type of lighting you have and the time of day.  At night, it will add a tint to the screen to make it less harsh.

Unfortunately, I could not get screen snapshots that can show the differences between settings so you will have to trust me on that.

The settings screen is very easy – you can change the location and define the type of lighting you have in your room.

Once you have your settings, click on the done button and you will get to this screen which will let you see how the screen changes over the day (click on the dialog window and the ball will move through the day).

But I’m working and want the screen to be full brightness

If you need to disable the program, you can disable it for one hour on the settings screen (or just turn it off).  I think this is very limiting, but hopefully this will be modified in the future.

A web-based To Do list – Remember The Milk

Do you have trouble keeping organized?  Do you try to work with To Do lists but they always seem to get lost or unwieldy?  There are many websites that offer a way to create and keep track of To Do lists.  One of the most popular is Remember The Milk, which has a free version, and can be found here.

Overall View

The home page gives you a list of what tasks are due, and a way to print a basic weekly planner.

Creating tasks

Creating tasks is very easy and you have the additional benefit of being able to create different categories of lists (what you see on this screen screenshot is the default lists).

To create the task, you type in the task under the tab (list) you want it to appear in.

If you click on the task after creating it, on the right side of the screen are options that you can use to further refine the task (by clicking on the item)

One of the neat things is the due date, you can type things like “Saturday” and it will put in the date (or “Next Saturday” for two Saturdays from now).

When you have completed a task you go to the task list, select the task, and click on the Complete button to get it off of the list.

Creating Lists

To create a new list you need to select the settings tab on the top right of the page and then the lists tab comes up.

From here you can create new lists, set one of the lists to be the default, and delete lists.

Setting Reminders

From the settings menu, you can select the reminders tab to set how often you wish to get reminders.

You can be reminded by email, SMS, or some IM clients (including AIM, Yahoo, and GoogleTalk)

If you set email reminders, this is what the email will look like:

Adding Tasks via email

To create tasks via email, you need to go the settings option and then the Info tab.  The Inbox Email Address is the address you need to send the email to.  The format of the email is shown below (via Remember The Milk’s help pages).  There is more detailed information at this link.

Subject: Weekly work meeting
To: [Your Remember The Milk email address]

Priority: 1
Due: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee
---
This is a heading for the first note.

This is the first note's content.
---
This is a heading for the second note.

Adding Tasks from a webpage (the Add to RTM! bookmark)

You can add a bookmark to you browser that will allow you to add any date you find on the web into your task list.  To get the bookmark, go here.  Once you have it, highlight any text and click on the bookmark – the following window will appear:

Make the selections you want and the task will be put into Remember The Milk.

Search

Remember The Milk has a basic search function at the top of page where you can put in words that you want to find in your task name.  There is also a more sophisticated search that you can select by clicking on the “Show Search Options” link.

That will bring up the following dialog box:

If you want more information about the different advanced search options, you can get it here.

Smart Lists

Smart lists are really lists based on a search criterion.  To create a smart list, first run a search.  Once the search is completed, on the right side of the window, click on the save tab and give the search a name.

Once you save it, a tab will be created with this smart list name.

The Pro version

If you wish to get extra features, you can subscribe to the pro version.  These are the extra features that you will receive (from their website):

• Priority support via email
• New! RTM for Android
• RTM for iPhone and iPod touch
• MilkSync for BlackBerry
• MilkSync for Windows Mobile
• Pro Tester Program
• A warm fuzzy feeling for supporting RTM

How do you check a file for viruses without doing it on your machine? – VirusTotal.com

Obviously, one of the things that you aim to do is to keep your computer virus/malware free.  What can you do though if you have a file that you aren’t sure about, but don’t want to keep it on your machine and trust your antivirus program to quarantine it if there is a problem?

One thing you can do is send it up to a website and let it check the file for you.  There is such a website and it is free to use.  It is called VirusTotal, and is available here.

What is it?

Rather than paraphrase, here is the text from their website:

VirusTotal is a service developed by Hispasec Sistemas, an independent IT Security laboratory, that uses several command line versions of antivirus engines, updated regularly with official signature files published by their respective developers.

VirusTotal is a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines.

Specs:

• Free, independent service
• Use of multiple antivirus engines
• Real-time automatic updates of virus signatures
• Detailed results from each antivirus engine
• Real time global statistics

You will recognize a lot of the companies that have supplied antivirus engines for this service.  Some of the companies include Microsoft, TrendMicro, Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky Lab and AVG Technologies.  The complete list is available here.

How it works

When you go to the main page of the website, you click on the browse button and enter your file in.  The file will be uploaded to the VirusTotal website and analyzed.

The page will update as various checks are done.

At the end, you will get the final report.

Sending files to analyze by Email

You can also send files via email.  To do so, follow these steps:

• Create an email with a To address of scan@virustotal.com
• In the Subject field, enter the word SCAN

The file can not be greater than 20 MB in size.

The VirusTotal Uploader tool

If you want to send files via your context menu (right click), download the Virus Total Uploader, which is available here.  Once you install it, you will have another option on your “send to” list when you right click your mouse, it will be “VirusScan”.

In addition, the tool will allow you to upload process executables and also give you the option to not load files on your machine if you pull them from the web.

Free tools from Microsoft for students – the DreamSpark program

Microsoft has a program that allows students to download a whole set of programming and design tools, as well as some operating systems, for no cost through their DreamSpark program, which can be found here.

Who is eligible for this program?

Basically any student in high school, vocational or trade school, community college, university, or being home schooled is eligible.  Generally, any accredited school worldwide is eligible.

How do I sign up?

If you are a high school student, your school needs to register and they will give you an access key (home school students will follow this same procedure).  College students can sign up just by using their college address (most colleges are already registered, if not, there are instructions on what to do).

If you are under majority age (i.e. 18 in the US), then the student’s parent will need to be there for the signup process (and accept the software license terms).

Every 12 months, you will be asked to verify your student status through the site.

How limited are these tools?

They aren’t.  They are full versions.

So I can make my fortune through these tools?

Well, that you can not do.  The software is being supplied to students for educational purposes (i.e. personal use or class projects).  If you want to use these tools commercially, then you have to purchase them.

What happens when I graduate?

You can still use the tools you have downloaded, you just won’t get any new versions or new software.

What software can I get?

Here are some screenshots of what is available.

An online grocery shopping list – ZipList.com

If you are like me, you live by lists.  One of them is a grocery list.  I actually have a list on my computer that I print out for grocery shopping.  There are obviously a couple of drawbacks to this including:

• If I’m not at my computer, I can’t get, or modify, the list.
• I can’t have others add things to the list.
• I can’t easily share the list with others.

One company has a free solution to this – an online grocery shopping list and you can access it here.

How it works – finding grocery stores

The first thing that you will need to do is locate your grocery stores.  One reason to do this is so that you can have multiple lists, with items earmarked to a particular grocery store.

The search screen will bring up all of the appropriate stores

What do you do if you want to add a store that doesn’t exist in the list?  At the bottom of the search window is a textbox, you can add your store there.

Adding items to a list

Adding items is straight forward, from the lists option you type in the food and as you type, intellisense picks up and will give you options.  Once you select one, click the Add button and it will be added to your list in an appropriate category.

If you want to edit the item, go to the right of the list for that item and click on the pencil.  That will bring up the following dialog box:

Changing the aisle order

A grocery list isn’t that good if it doesn’t match the order of the aisles in the store.  You can modify the store aisles by going back to the store list and clicking on a store which will get the following screen.  From here, you can drag and drop the store aisle order to match your store.

Your profile information

If you click on the Profile link at the top of the webpage, you will get the following page:

From here you can manage a bunch of settings and also create new lists.

Sharing a list

To share a list, go to your profile, and with your mouse on the list, click on the person icon.  It will bring up the following screen which will allow you to share your list with others.

Accessing your list via instant messaging

One neat feature is the ability to access your list via an instant messenger.  You can do this once you are a registered user.  From the ZipList help files:

Once you are a registered ZipList user (this can be done here), you can use instant messaging with ZipList. To access your list, add the following buddy (or contact) to your instant messaging client.

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger): ziplistim
Yahoo Messenger: ziplistim
GoogleTalk: ziplistim@gmail.com
Microsoft Live Messenger: ziplistim@live.com

To retrieve your list, type: list

To add an item, type the name of the item: milk

To remove an item, type a dash or hyphen before the item name.
So texting: -coke would remove coke from your list.

To add multiple items at one time, type the name of the items separated by a period:
shredded cheese.sour cream

To switch lists, type: use <list name>
So for example, to view your family list, type: use family

To show items only for a specific store, type: list <store name>
So for example, to view items only for Safeway, type: list safeway

To show items that are marked as important, add an exclamation point after the item you want to add. For example, type: chips!

To assign an item to a specific store, type the item name followed by @store name
So typing: coke @ safeway would add coke to your list and assign it to Safeway.

To remove all the items from your list, type: -:all

To undo your last action, type: undo

You can also always type help to get information on how to use ZipList’s instant messaging interface.

Recipes

ZipList has the ability to store recipes and automatically add the ingredients of a recipe to your list.  If you want to capture a recipe from the web, you need to get the ZipList recipe clipper app which you can get from the Recipe page of ZipList.

Once you have this in your browser, when you go to a recipe site and click on the recipe clipper, you will get the following dialog box.  If you click to add it to your list, it automatically adds the ingredients to your list.

Your shopping list will now have an additional icon for these ingredients.  When you mouse over it, it will show you the recipe this ingredient is for and give you three options:

• Full Recipe
• Recipe Box
• Select All

If you just add the recipe, you can add its ingredients to your list by selecting the recipe and clicking on the plus icon (which will appear when your mouse is over the recipe).

You also can manually add recipes from the recipe section of ZipList.

How not to use PowerPoint

Nothing too heavy this week since it was a three day weekend.  Here are two YouTube links to comedian Don McMillan’s presentation on how not to use PowerPoint.

The updated 2010 presentation

The older version

Hope you enjoy them.

Remind People To Answer Your Emails – Followupthen.com

What can you do if you send an email to someone and need to make sure that they answer it?  One solution is a free website that will send a followup reminder on any email that you send, it is called FollowupThen.com and is available here.

How it works

The premise to FollowUpThen is that you need to send an email to followupthen.com with the time interval that you want the followup to be.  For example, the following are valid email addresses:

• tuesday@followupthen.com
• mar30@followupthen.com
• 2010-05-30@followupthen.com
• 1minute@followupthen.com
• 2hours@followupthen.com
• 3days@followupthen.com
• 4weeks@followupthen.com
• 5months@followupthen.com
• 6years@followupthen.com

Sending followup emails to others

There are two ways to create a followup message, you can send an email to FollowUpThen in either the CC field or the BCC field.  The differences are (from the FollowUpThen website):

CC Field

Both you and your recipient will receive a followup if they have not replied within the time interval you specify. (Note: Your recipient has to “reply all” to include followupthen on their response for us to know about it).

BCC Field

Your recipient never knows about followupthen. You are the only one that will get the followup.

(This is good for something like a sales followup call.  You can mark to get a reminder say 3 months in the future.)

The originating email

Your copy of the followup (if you used the CC field):

The recipient’s copy of the followup:

Sending a reminder to yourself

If you send an email to FollowUpThen with a time interval, the site will send you a reminder email at that time.

For example, if you create this email with a To address of 5minutes@followupthen.com:

It will send the following reminder:

What about privacy?

Since you are forwarding your emails through to another site, privacy can be a valid concern.  Here is what the company says in their documentation:

We don’t share your information with 3rd parties. (And no, we are not spammers) We automatically delete your email contents once the followup has been sent, as well as your recipient’s email address. Also, your data is stored in an encoded format in our database so is not viewable in plain text to our system admins. Read more about the company behind followupthen here: http://www.followupthen.com/about

Get a list of pending followups

If you send an email to pending@followupthen.com from your email address, you will get a list of pending followup messages, along with a way to cancel any of them.

If you click on the link, you will be sent to their website

One problem – verifying your email address

Despite the site saying I didn’t have to, it did send me the following email and made me verify my email address.  Until I did, I was getting error messages from FollowUpThen saying that they couldn’t send the emails.  Once I confirmed my email, then everything went smoothly.  So if you want to use this initially for followups that are only an hour or two out, you may want to wait until you get a confirmed email address.