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Sat, Feb 20, 2021 7:29 pm
Checking the ink level for a Canon TR8520 Printer
To check the level of ink in the ink cartridges for a Canon TR8520
printer on a Windows 10 system, you can take the following steps:
- Select Devices.
- Select Printers & scanners.
- Click on Canon TR8500 series.
- Click on Manage.
- Click on the View Printer Status button.
You can then see the level of ink in the magenta (M), black (BK),
yellow (Y), Black (PGBK), and Cyan (C) cartridges.
If you are near the printer, you can also check the ink levels from
the front panel of the printer by touching the Setup icon, which looks like a
gear, on the home screen of the front panel. Then tap "Estimated ink levels" on
the panel. You will then see the estimated ink levels for each cartridge
displayed. If the ink is depleted or near depletion in a cartridge, there
will be a red circle with a white "X" in it dispalyed over the cartridge.
[ More Info ]
[/hardware/printer/canon/tr8520]
permanent link
Fri, Feb 05, 2021 1:08 pm
Auto Warranty Telemarketer Calling from 410-457-9422
When I checked my cellphone this morning, I found I had missed a call an
hour before from 1-410-457-9422. The call was listed as coming from Darlington,
Maryland. I hadn't been to Darlington, MD in decades, so suspected it might
be from a telemarketer, but called just to check, since I couldn't find
information online associating the number with a telemarketer or scammer.
When I called the number, an automated system answered that identified the
number as being associated with an auto warranty service and gave me the
option of hitting "1" to be removed from its calling list, which I chose to do.
[/phone]
permanent link
Wed, Dec 16, 2020 9:15 pm
Creating a dropdown list in Microsoft Excel
In the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program, if you wish to create a dropdown
list where a user can select options from the list for a cell's value, you can
take the steps below:
-
Highlight the cells where you wish to have the the dropdown list appear, e.g.,
by clicking in a cell and dragging downwards through a column where a user
should select from the dropdown list.
-
Click on Data on the menu bar at the top of the Excel window
-
Click on Data Validation.
-
If you see 3 options under Data Validation, i.e., Data Validation,
Circle Invalid Data, and Clear Validation Circles, select Data
Validation.
-
You will then see a window where you can change settings. In the "Allow"
field for validation criteria, select List.
-
You will then be given an option to provide the items for the list in
the source field. If you have just a couple of options for the list
that won't change, you can type them separated by a comma.
-
Click on OK.
In cells where you have chosen to present a dropdown list to a user,
when the user clicks on the cell or tabs into it, he/she will see a
small box with a downward pointing arrowhead appear to the right of
the cell. The user can then either type a value in the field or he/she
can chose a value from the dropdown list by clicking on the small
box with the downard pointing arrowhead. If the user types a value
that isn't in the list rather than selecting from the dropdown list,
when the user hits enter or moves the cursor out of the cell, he/she
will see the message "The value you entered is not valid. A user has
restricted values that can be entered in this cell."
[ More Info ]
[/software/office/excel]
permanent link
Mon, Dec 14, 2020 2:49 pm
Comparing Keepass database entries by modification times
I needed to compare two
KeePass Password Safe
(version 2.45) databases, since one was copied to a laptop where I thought
it might have been updated after it was copied with the original also
being updated, so the two files no longer matched. I needed to add any
new entries from the laptop to the original database. I knew there should
at most only be a few additions on the laptop. You can see modification
timestamps by clicking on an individual entry and then selecting the
History tab for that entry, but I didn't want to go through every entry
in the database that way to determine new entries, since it would have
taken many hours. There is a way to speed the process by clicking on
View from the KeePass menu bar which will give you the option
to select
Configure Columns.
Check the check box next for Last Modification Time, then
click on OK. You will then see a "Last Modification Time" column
for each entry, so you don't have to open each entry, though you will have
to go through each group you've created to check the last modification time
for entries, but you can click on the column header for "Last Modification
Time" to sort them by time. You can sort them from oldest to newest or newest
to oldest by clicking on the column header multiple times to toggle the
display. By then viewing a list of entries under each group within KeePass
on the laptop, I could see that nothing had been added, so I didn't need
to add any entries to the original database to ensure synchronization of
any updates made to the copy with the original file.
[/software/security/keepass]
permanent link
Mon, Nov 16, 2020 7:55 pm
Extracting image files from Google Chrome Cache
I wanted to save a local copy of an image on a webpage I was viewing in
the Google Chrome browser on a Windows 10 system, but I couldn't right-click on
it to download it, so I thought I could look for it in the Chrome browser
cache, which is located at
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User
Data\Default\Cache
where
username is the name of the relevant
account on a Windows system. I had the
ChromeCacheView
program from
NirSoft on the
system, which provides a command-line option to copy image files from the
Chrome cache for a user, so I used it. Since I was logged into a regular
user account, I
opened a command prompt as the
administrator and then made the working directory the directory where
the ChromeCacheView program was located with
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Network\NirSoft\ChromeCacheView
. Then
from that directory I issued the command below:
chromecacheview -folder "C:\Users\JohnDoe\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\" /copycache "" "image/png" /CopyFilesFolder "c:\users\johndoe\documents\temp\chrome" /UseWebSiteDirStructure 0
You can use the -folder
option to tell ChromeCacheView which
user's cache file you wish to use while the /copycache
option
can be used to specify the directory where you want images, such as
PNG files,
to be copied—in this case I was looking for a .png file because when I
examined the HTML code on the
webpage I thought that the the image was a PNG file. I created a
temp\chrome
directory under the Documents directory for
the user account prior to issuing the command to hold the images stored
in the cache. After the command completed, I could see all of the PNG
files that had been in the Chrome cache in that temporary directory I
had created.
When I didn't see the image I was looking for, I thought I might have
misidentified it in the code, so I copied all of the image files from the
cache directory, not just the PNG ones by changing "image/png" to
"image" in the command. I.e.:
chromecacheview -folder "C:\Users\JohnDoe\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\" /copycache "" "image" /CopyFilesFolder "c:\users\johndoe\documents\temp\chrome" /UseWebSiteDirStructure 0
That copied
AVIF
(.avif), BMP
GIF (.gif),
icon
(.ico), JPEG (.jpg),
JPEG File
Interchange Format (JFIF) (.jfif),
SVG (.svg),
and WebP (.webp) files from
the cache as well as the PNG ones.
[/network/web/browser/chrome]
permanent link
Tue, Nov 03, 2020 3:56 pm
Book Collector lock file
When I opened Book Collector version 20.5.2 today, I saw the message
"Failed to open database, because your license key (xxxxxxxxxxxx) is already in
use on computer "YYYYYYYY" by another user (zzzzzz). Do you wish to unlock your
database file and open it here?" I could choose "yes" or "no" with the "no"
answer opening Book Collector with a new empty book database. The computer the
message referenced was the one on which I was currently trying to open the
program. Since the system I was using had crashed earlier in the day, I
realized that Book Collector was likely finding a lock file that would be
deleted when the program is closed normally. I saw a file with the name I had
given to my book collection, but with a .bkclck
filename
extension in the directory where I stored the book database. When I opened
the file I saw the file conained only one line:
<lockinfo><writable><client pcname="YYYYYYYY" name="5c22840efc7a3db854c44b0b780f8abc" key="xxxxxxxxxxxx" username="zzzzzzzz"/></writable></lockinfo>
In cases where Book Collector was not closed normally, you can either choose
"yes" at the prompt or delete the .bkclck file before opening Book
Collector as its presence is what causes the message to appear.
[/software/database/collectorz]
permanent link
Mon, Oct 19, 2020 7:42 pm
Downloading Panopto videos
To download a video hosted on
Panopto, such as a class
lecture, you can take the following steps in the
Firefox web
browser:
-
Right-click on the video in Panoptoo—you may need to click on the small
video in the upper, left-hand side of the window rather than the one on the
right side of the window—and select "Inspect Element (Q)."
In the "Search HTML" field, type
.mp4
and hit
Enter—this presumes the video is an
MP4 video.
-
You should see the area in the HTML code where the MP4 file is referenced
highlighted.
Right-click on the highlighted area and choose "Copy" then "Outer HTML."
-
Then paste the information copied into the clipboard into
Microsoft Notepad or some other text editor, depending on your operating
system and preferred editor. You should see the
URL for the
video listed in the content pasted into the editor. Copy the URL starting with
the "https" up through the ".mp4"—don't copy the information after
the ".mp4."
-
Paste the copied URL into a browser tab. You can then right-click on the
video in that browser tab and select "Save Video As" to download the video
to your local system. You can give the video a more meaningful name than
the long string of
hexadecimal
digits used for the name.
[ More Info ]
[/video/panopto]
permanent link
Mon, Oct 05, 2020 9:25 pm
Your electricity will be cut off in 30 minutes
At 11:55 AM EDT this morning, my wife received a recorded call stating our
electricity would be cut off by Delmarva Power, our electric utility, in
thirty minutes. She called for me to pick up the phone, but by the time I got
to a phone in another room, the call was disconnected. She said the message
had instructed her to hit "1" to speak to someone. The call sounded like a
scam to me, since I didn't know of any issue with our electicity payments and
also because I would have expected a letter well before a cutoff date and
more than 30 minutes to pay any past due payment if someone called. It seemed
to me an obvious attempt to panic a called party into providing a credit card
to a scammer engaged in fraud, but I checked our bank account anyway and saw
the last payment due had been deducted from our checking account about two
weeks before the call and when I logged into Delmarva's website to check the
status of our account, I saw the last payment credited and a balance of zero
dollars.
Using *69, I was able to determine the listed calling number was
1-443-739-1747, but a search online for accounts of others receiving a call
from a scammer using that number did not reveal other such activity. I called
the number back to see how the scammer operated or to see if it might be
a spoofed number, but just got a recorded message that the called party
was not available, so I should leave a message. It sounded like a generic
voicemail message. So, perhaps, the scammer spoofed the calling number
as they often do to make it difficult to track down their identity.
[/security/scams]
permanent link
Wed, Sep 30, 2020 4:41 pm
Placing timestamps at ends of lines of a transcript for Panopto videos
After watching lectures for classes that are stored on the
Panopto website, I like
to save the text listed for a video in the Contents and Captions that
Panopto provides in a text file. However, if I copy and paste the text into
Windows Notepad
or some other
text
editor, I see the timestamps appear beneath the relevant text on the
following line. To address the problem, I paste the text into
the
Vim editor
on a Microsoft Windows system and apply the command
v/\d:\d\d\n/s/\n/ /
that replaces the end-of-line character
at the end of all lines that don't have a timestamp with a space, instead.
[ More Info ]
[/video/panopto]
permanent link
Sat, Sep 12, 2020 7:48 pm
Codes for Short and Long Vowels in Latin
If you wish to insert vowels used in Latin in a document, such as
a Microsoft Word or
WordPad
document, on a Microsoft Windows system to indicate
vowel length, i.e.,
whether the vowel should be pronounced as a long or short vowel, you can use
the
Unicode values shown
in the table below — Unicode is an encoding standard for characters
in most of the world's
writing systems. For Latin, a
macron, which is
a
diacritic mark,
is placed above the letter to indicate a long vowel. Sometimes a
breve may also be used
to indicate a short vowel. In addition to the Unicode codes, the corresponding
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
code is listed as well for displaying the characters in a web page.
To insert the characters using a Windows keyboard on a system running the
Microsoft Windows operating system, type the numeric code (the numbers are
hexadecimal numbers so
"A" through "F" represent the numbers 10 through 15) and then hit Alt-x,
i.e., hit the "Alt" and "x" keys simultaneously, after entering the numeric
code. Note, you needed to have a space before the number you enter, otherwise
if you attempt to put "ē" in "fēmina," by typing "f" with "0113"
immediately after it, the "f0113" will be replaced with a small box with a
question mark within it. So place a space after the "f," type
0113
, hit Alt-x, then when ē
appears, remove
the space before it. Also note that though Microsoft Word supports this
method of entering vowels with a diacritic mark in a document not all
Microsoft Office
applications allow you to enter Unicode characters by this
method. E.g., for
Microsoft Powerpoint, you will need to use the
Character Map method of entering such characters, instead.
[ More Info ]
[/languages]
permanent link
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