XPS helped when PDF form failed!

The other day, one of our family friends was struggling to handle a 3 page printable PDF form he downloaded from a Government website in front of a computer without printer at home. The trouble was that you can fill in the form, using Adobe Reader, but have to print it just after filling it in as you can not save the form with data in the fields. So, what’s wrong, just print it. Yes, but Officeworks would not edit the document before printing and he could not print it at home just after editing. He rang me for a solution and after a short call we agreed for him to visit his Uni to print it. Soon after, he called me again to say that he was able to save the PDF file with data. I was quite surprised.

Later, when I was at his home, I asked to see that file he saved. and to my pleasant surprise, it was an XPS file. He used his laptops default printer, which was set to XPS printer, for printing the PDF form with data, without realising that it is not PDF! (Should I say luckily?) He was able to open the file at the print center and successfully print it!

So, if you dont have access to printer, try looking for XPS printer option! For that matter you can consider a PDF-printer-driver, or Send to One note printer as well. In a nut shell, look for any thing that does not look like a known printer company brand in your printers list in print dialog box.

Use Google Docs for Quick Unicode Printing

My friend typed some paragraphs in “Pramukh Typepad” as he wanted to print and share them with friends. Now, as his computer was recently reset (re-formatted), he did not have Unicode fonts installed on his Windows. He had MS Word and he was trying to create a word file just to print those paragraphs. So, he copied the paragraphs from the Typepad web page and pasted into the word file only to get those weird I-don’t-know-what-you-are-talking-about missing-font boxes. Changing the fonts to Shruti (One of the quick solutions for Gujarati/Indic fonts) did not work somehow. As the call was going longer, I suggested a shortcut.

I suggested him to paste the contents to a new Google Docs file and Print. Not just that it worked but he was also able to export it to PDF in order to distribute with formatting ready-to-print!

Extra Mobile Charger for FREE!

My LG Viewty is a multimedia extensive mobile and hence it often runs out of battery. OK, I can also be blamed for not charging it everyday! But, by going dead, it leaves me into a difficult situation when someone can not access me on mobile despite of paying a hefty amount for the service.

I thought of keeping the charger at work so I can charge it in the daytime. That might create troubles in weekends (especially long weekends) and holidays when I make more calls. Second thought was that of another charger. I could buy a new or a second hand charger for cheap. but why buy? This morning, I suddenly got this idea. How about keeping the USB data cable at work and charger at home. I prefer to use Blue Tooth  to transfer files to laptop. So, the cable is almost unused at home. Being on the computer all the working day, I can easily have it plugged when it seems low on battery.

Most 3G mobiles provide a USB Data cable that double as a charging point from your computer. This way, they can be used pretty easily as a charger.

I implemented it right today. and now no more drained-batteries, and dead-mobiles!

Fake InPrivate in IE8

This is misleading, type ‘about:inprivate’ in IE8 (RC1 : 8.0.6001.18372)’s address bar and it will show you an internal page with message that says “InPrivate is turned on”, while you are still in normal browsing mode. Here are a couple of screen shots, where the fake one still show the Google Toolbar which should not be there in inPrivate and also InPrivate logo in address bar and text in titlebar are not there.

Fake

Real

Advertizing with Warning Sign Theme – Bad?

How many ads do you encounter in a day and how many of them do you ignore? What do you think?

Warning Sign Theme Misuse in Ad

I saw this advertisement on a web page and although it does not really attract me by content, it did attract my attention due to design. Quite witty huh? Well, what I am concerned about is that it is using a Warning sign theme. Ads like this do grab any user’s attention suddenly as one would be used to pay attention to such signs. But, if this is a trend, we should stop it as it is a bad one, because ponded by so many advertisements everyday everywhere, ‘human senses’ have probably started ignoring many of them. In this scenario, the theme used here is something that DOES require attention, so I think this is an abuse of the theme. Ultimately, you are teaching users’ brains to ignore important warnings! this could be dangerous.

VoiceMail in Gmail

In just 2 Steps:

1. Activate your VoiceMail on your mobile.
2. Setup POP3 fetch of your Mobile Service Provider’s Email into Gmail.

Specifically for Three Mobile Customers:

1. Remember you created a free three email address when you sunscribed? Didn’t you? you can still create one. Confirm that you have configured a three.com.au email address and that you can access it at http://webmail.three.com.au/. your three email address should be yourusername@three.com.au. If you dont know what this means discuss the keywords here with three customer care at 133320.
2. Use your phone or ring the customer care (133320 in Australia) to activate the voicemail on your service. Confirm that it is free to RECEIVE voicemails and all the voicemails are emailed to your three.com.au email address.
3. Follow the Gmail Help on POP Download and fetch all those emails into Gmail.
4. All done, next time when someone rings you and you dont pickup, look for a WMA attachment with an email from three into your Gmail inbox to listen to the whistle or voice recorded!

Was this tip helpful? Let me know.

Right click disabled, drag it!

I have got Chrome, Firefox, IE8, Opera and Safari and I use them in the same order of preference. The other day I wanted to test a link in Chrome, with firefox. Because Chrome is still an unidentified in many online system compatibility check routines (e.g. http://event.on24.com still does not know it) , it requested me to ‘UPGRADE’ to IE! funny! I right clicked the “Test Your System” link anticipating to copy url and paste it in Firefox which was already open. the javascript on the page showed me an annoying security prompt.

All I did was to drag the link to firefox on the windows taskbar, and when firefox opened up (maximised/restored) dropped it in the empty area to the right of the last tab in the tabs bar. and that link opened in it.

if you are not afraid of looking the current tab then you can leave the dragged link on the current tab (or blank page if you just opened firefox!).

You can also click and drag and hold the link (in air?) and alt tab to any other browser and drop it in the tabs bar or the current tab.

Experiments achieve expertise!

Opening URLs that are not hyperlinked

For Firefox lovers only, Internet Explorer guys, please wait until IE 100 or something! L

I often encounter the hateful links put as text and not as a hyperlink. I was trying to create a bookmarklet as I was tired of using the right click > Search Google For … (requires Google Toolbar).

But today I found the easiest way to do it. In Firefox if your selection is a URL and if you drop it on a tab then as text and drag and drop it onto the free tab space besides the open tabs where the new tab will be shown.

Case 1: No tabs. FF is showing only one page. No tabs visible: Press Ctrl+T to open a new tab first. And then go back to the page. Select the URL and drag and drop it onto the newly opened tab to open it there.

Case 2: at least two tabs open.

    Case 2a: Reuse a tab: Just drag and drop the URL on an existing tab to reuse that tab.

    Case 2b: New Tab: Just drag and drop the URL onto the new tab are to create a new tab.

Try this one with http://www.google.com

Cheers!

Auto Center and Multiple Screens!

And there was a form-dialog which is opening but not showing up! Yes, I could apply Break Points in VBA but could not see the form. I tried Me.SetFocus() and changing the form border, or to say almost all the arguments that I could change in DoCmd.OpenForm command, but this invisible form would not be caught. As I was expecting it to be open as a dialog, you could not click and work on the calling form and this would make you feel that the application has hung or frozen; which was not the case as I noticed it stopping in VBA for timer events! As this was happening on the Win 2000 server, clients panicked that they had to terminate the remote desktop to get rid of this situation. I myself tested it and had to agree with them. But the same version was working fine on my dev environment! I could see the form with no problems!

And to add salt to the bruises, the moment you select Run > Design Mode in VBA screen the form will be there in Design Mode! Where have you been, dear?

I realised that the problem might not be as difficult to chase. Possibilities are that the form is visible but is not in the viewport. These days I develop Access applications on two screens. There is this regular 14″ laptop screen for VBA coding and there is a big 17″ desktop screen for Form Design. There are chances that I have placed it on other window while developing and I needed to find out some way to focus it again.

I asked one of my senior colleagues and he showed me the Auto Center (Center form or report automatically?) property of the form! Just set it to true while in Design Mode and regardless of the position of the form at design time, it will centre in the viewport, here I am! Bingo!

Using DownThemAll! As FTP downloader

DownThemAll! Is a really good extension for Firefox. I used it successfully for FTP download where other FTP when showing Timeout error.

1. Goto DownThemAll Manager
2. Add URL as ftp://username:password@site.name.or.IP.address.like.111.111.111.111/complete/path/upto/filename.extension
3. Just start.