When traveling and trying to use the hard wire at a hotel, you may find that the provided Ethernet cable won’t work. This is because hotels typically have a very outdated infrastructure and are still running at 10Mbps.

Most new computers are set with network speed set to auto detect, but this relies on the hardware being able to handle that detection, which older, cheaper network boxes aren’t able to do.

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ContextMenu · Ethernet · Frankfurt · Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers · IPad · Juniper Networks · Mouse (computing) · Windows

I’ve been working with the VA on a large project, where I was recently issued a laptop. Due to security concerns, they only allow VA government furnished equipment to connect to their network.

It’s the first time in a long while where I’ve had a setup where I didn’t have an adminstrative account, and some of the restrictions surprised me. The work I’m doing is for a group in Austin, Texas (located at the AITC), which means the computer was set up in the CST time zone. By default, Microsoft restricts setting the time to the administrator account (I think because it affects all users of the computer, although for a laptop that really shouldn’t matter), so I can’t change the time zone without desktop support.

While trying to see if there was a workaround in Outlook, I learned that you can set up a second time zone there, which helps you see the difference more easily.

Step 1: Go to Tools/Options from the menu:

Step 2: click the Calendar Options button:

Step 4: Add a label to the current windows time zone (CST unless you’ve had desktop change it for you).

Step 5: Check the box that says “Show an additional time zone”, and add the PST zone.

Step 6: click OK, and you’ll see both zones in your calendar.

Note:  Some web searches I’ve done have suggested that it is possible to create a policy  to allow a restricted user to change the time zone. (Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment\Change the time zone), but without that you won’t be able to change the time zone as the computer is restricted to only allowing administrators to change the system time (Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment\Change the system time)

Coordinated Universal Time · Microsoft · Microsoft Windows · Personal Information Managers · Shareware · timezone · United States · Windows

On the first day of 360iDev, I was in a session to learn about programming an iPhone, and somebody mentioned that a friend of theirs had updated their iPod firmware, and couldn’t figure out how to reset it back to the prior version. Since I had recently done this, I thought I could write this walk-through.

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Apple · Backup · IPad · IPhone · iPod · iTunes · Microsoft Windows · Windows

I recently was seeing a few weird problems with Entourage and synching, so I decided to check and see if it was up to date.

I have a copy of Entourage 2008 that I got from an Exchange hosting service that I use for email with one of my partner companies.

Looking at the Entourage/About Entourage, I saw that I was running version 12.1.3,which was a couple of revs back from the current version (12.1.5). So I picked Update from the Help menu in Entourage:

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Apple Disk Image · Entourage · Entourage 2008 · File Management · Finder · Microsoft Entourage · TextEdit · Windows