Category Archives: Technology – Tips & Fixes

FIX: Android Battery Draining & Overheating

Media Server
Media Server seems to get confused with too many files

In case anyone else with an Android phone is having problems with overheating and battery drain, I found the solution. It’s a bug in Media Server that afflicts some ROMs. When too many files build up on your phone, it goes bonkers. Here’s the fix:

1. Remove all unneeded files from your phone (photos, music, videos, and any other files you have in volume – e.g. I had several hundred crossword files). I moved what I wanted to save but didn’t need on my phone to my computer, and deleted the rest.

2. Go to Settings->Apps->All, scroll down to find “Media Storage”, click Force Stop, and then Clear Data. In the screenshot, Media Server has only 7.31MB of data. Before I cleared it and rebooted, it was over 52MB. How big is yours?

3. Restart your phone.

This will force Media Server to start again clean and reindex everything, restoring your phone to its original cool-running, long-battery-life state.

Surface Pro with Windows 8: My Take

I’m a technophile, and I particularly love tablets. I bought the iPad within weeks of its initial release. I have a really nice Android tablet – Google’s Nexus 10. And now I have a Microsoft Surface Pro with Windows 8. I’ve used all three extensively. What do I think of the Surface Pro? It’s not perfect, but it’s very good.

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How to Turn off the Junk E-mail Filter in Outlook 2010

I recently switched over to Outlook 2010 from Outlook 2007 (I’m slow). I always disable the Junk E-mail filter in Outlook because I use something better: Popfile. But I was having trouble doing that in Outlook 2010. I selected the radio box for no filtering, but messages were still being directed to the Junk E-mail folder.

I took to the internet to search for an answer, and discovered that I was having this problem because I have multiple accounts, and Outlook 2010 handles junk mail filtering on a per-account basis. But there was mass confusion on how to access the settings for each account. There is no global setting area in the interface.

Even Microsoft MVPs on Microsoft sites were giving misinformation. Many were suggesting that people disable Junk E-mail in the registry. That didn’t sound right to me, and I didn’t want to do it. I do use some pieces of the Junk E-mail feature – the disabling of links and the safe/blocked sender lists. Plus, judging from peoples’ complaints, it seemed like the suggested registry tweak just disabled the interface and not the functionality!

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Kindle 3 Tips and Tricks

Kindle 3

I resisted the Kindle for a long time. I read a lot and I’m headache-prone, and those low-contrast early Kindles were not going to work for me. Also, I saw in reviews that Kindle books often lacked the footnotes and indexes of the paper versions. When I had occasion to create a Kindle book I realized why: the format is very limited and inconvenient for publishers.

But then I bought an iPad. The Kindle app is free, so I tried a couple ebooks. For most books I read, footnotes and indexes are not an issue, and I’m chronically low on bookshelf space. I like the built-in dictionary and being able to carry several books in a small package. So now I was sold on ebooks, but the iPad was not the ideal hardware. It’s just heavy enough that I don’t want to carry it around, the screen washes out in bright sunlight, and the battery life is only so-so. I can read books on my Droid X phone, which also has a Kindle app, but that drains the battery fast.

Amazon had dropped the price of the Kindle when the iPad was released, and the new Kindle 3 with its light weight, improved screen contrast, long battery life, and readability in direct sunlight was starting to look pretty good. So I bought one, and I like it a lot. I used it for a few days without reading the manual – the basics are not hard. But once I read the manual and did a little googling, I discovered some interesting things I didn’t know. What follows is a collection of tips and tricks for the Kindle 3 that I found especially useful:

  • Viewing PDFs and Other Document Types
  • Zapping that Ghost Dictionary in the Archive
  • Hotkeys and an Easter Egg
  • The Hidden Image Viewer

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Universal Remote Control Fine Points

In a previous post, I wrote about how I was able to use a learning remote from Universal Remote Control (the URC-WR7) to set up a Bose Wave Radio as the audio for my TV, cable box, and Blu-ray player. At the time I hadn’t fully configured everything. Now that I have, I want to share a few more things I discovered:

  • The secret to learning from the Time-Warner Cable remote, which at first appears not to work
  • What to do if you want to access more device features than the WR7 has buttons
  • Tips on using the punch-through and macro features

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Bluetooth Mouse Losing Connection No More!

Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000
Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000

I have a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 that I bought when I bought my new Thinkpad with built-in Bluetooth. At the time I was running 64-bit Vista and all was well. Then I upgraded to 64-bit Windows 7, and suddenly the mouse started constantly losing connection.

There was no detectable pattern. It would work fine for a while, and then start disconnecting all the time for no apparently reason. Sometimes it would not wake up after sleeping, but sometimes it would quit while I was using it. At first I got it going again by removing the mouse from the list of Bluetooth devices and then adding it back in. That took too much time. Then, by accident, I discovered that I could wake it up by opening my Bluetooth settings and toggling the checkbox “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer”. If it was off I’d turn it on, if it was on I’d turn it off. That was faster, but still a pain.

I searched the internet and found many similar complaints, but no solutions. Several sites suggested upgrading your Bluetooth drivers. There’s no new driver for the Microsoft mouse, but I updated the Thinkpad Bluetooth drivers. No joy. Then the other day the mouse started quitting on me every few minutes and in desperation I searched again. This time I found the answer. There are two separate settings that need to be changed.

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Control a Bose Wave Radio with a Universal Remote

The picture on my new 40″ Samsung LCD HDTV is amazing, but the sound, not so much. So I plugged the audio output of the television into the auxilliary jack for my Bose Wave Radio (model AWRCC1). Much better! But then I encountered a new problem. When the TV audio is external, the TV remote can’t control it. Luckily the radio has a remote (otherwise I’d have to walk across the room to mute the TV when the phone rings), but I’d rather have the TV volume on the same remote as the rest of the TV controls.

First I tried to set the auxilliary button on my Time-Warner Cable remote to the Bose radio. The cable remote instructions list these codes for Bose audio equipment: 070, 170, 224, 374, 409, 460, 532. I tried them all, but none of them worked. So then I tried the scanning method, holding down the channel button until the radio turns off. But it never turned off.

I did an internet search on controlling Bose devices with universal remotes and found a plethora of contradictory information, none of which solved my problem. So I called Bose customer support. Their products may be pricey, but they sure have good customer support. I got someone on the phone immediately, and he was knowledgeable. He explained the problem instantly and gave me the solution.

And now I’m sharing it with you.

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Locked & Vanishing Files in Dreamweaver and InDesign

Do you use Dreamweaver? Have you ever been editing a file and then suddenly you can’t save it and Dreamweaver reports the file as locked? And then if you reboot to unlock the file, you discover it has vanished?

Do you use the InDesign book feature? Have you ever saved the book and then discovered that it has vanished?

Both problems appear to occur only with CS4 running on Vista. [[Edit: Not just with Vista: It’s reported in a comment below to have occurred on Windows 7. -sc]] Here are the workarounds.

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The Best WordPress Theme Ever: Atahualpa

I don’t like to build my Web sites completely around blog software, and yet I want them to have a consistent look and feel. I want the blog to look like the rest of the site. The blog on this site isn’t integrated – it looks completely different from the site’s home page and other pages. But the blog I just installed on another one of my sites looks exactly like the rest of the site – the theme is consistent throughout.

If you go to normaleating.com and click on the Blog button, you will see that the look-and-feel of the blog and the rest of the site are identical. This site contains much more than a blog. There’s a forum with a chat, a newsletter, various content pages (sample chapters from my book), a testimonials page, etc.

How did I get the blog to look like the rest of the site? The Atahualpa theme. (I can never remember that name. What does it mean?) This theme gives you a menu-driven interface to just about every WordPress theme option so you can make your site look exactly like you want. I had no trouble at all duplicating the layout of the rest of my site, and it was a lot easier to do in Atahualpa than it would have been manually. It takes a little time to set up because there are so many options, but none of it is hard. All you need to know is a little basic CSS.

Now that I’ve found Atahualpa, I’ll never use any other theme. I was so enchanted with it I sent the author a donation.