I was working on a spreadsheet where I had a range of cells I wanted a drop down date picker/calendar for. Now, I could have just added a bazillion calendar controls (one to each cell) but I knew that was cheesy and that there had to be a better way. Well now, I found an awesome tutorial on adding just the thing and I had to share. One control and a little bit of VBA code and you are all set working like a pro. Check it out, the info at the end of this link rocks! Enjoy!!
Category Archives: How To
Linux, your iPhone and your pictures
I suppose this might work for an iPod touch as well, but the ones I have and have seen don’t have cameras. OK, on to the tip! Recently I wanted to get all of my pictures copied off of my iPhone and onto my computer running Linux, specifically Debian 5.0. Normally with something like a USB thumb drive this is easy, once you plug it in, even if it doesn’t auto mount itself you can at least look in your messages file to see the actual device path in order to mount it manually. However, what I noticed with my iPhone (3GS version 3.1.2) is that not only did it not auto mount, my messages file didn’t list any information about a device path for me to mount it manually.
From here naturally I turned to Google, but everything I came across talked about installing iFuse and some kind of ipod-convenience package or said it couldn’t be done, or my favorite that you had to have a jail-broken phone in order to do it. Now, I didn’t want to install a bunch of packages I wasn’t familiar with just for this, and I darn sure didn’t want to jail-break my phone either. If for no other reason than because I was convinced that if I could do it in Windows (connect to my iPhone and copy my pics off), there had to be a way to do it in Linux too, without having to alter the device. I am hard headed that way, but in this case it worked.
Now this might be obvious and simple to everyone else, and if so I am sorry to bore you, but it wasn’t something I was familiar with. I did have an inspiration though, something so simple I just knew it wouldn’t work but I decided to try it out anyway. I fired up gthumb which was conveniently installed already, and is a tool for doing just what I wanted to do, importing pictures from a digital camera among other things. I then plugged in my iPhone and gthumb picked it up immediately and started pulling up a list of all my pics on the phone. From there I could import, rotate, delete originals and more, easy as pie. It worked perfect, and was very simple, just like it should be.
In the end, I found that I didn’t have to install any software hacks or jail-break my phone, just use the right tool for the job. Ain’t Linux grand?
Transferring Apps From Your iPhone To iTunes
I have my older model iPod, before touch screens and all that, and it’s a great gadget as I am sure anyone out there with one already knows. However, I recently purchased an iPhone 3GS and frankly it’s pretty much the best phone/PDA/PIM/etc that I have ever seen or had, and I started with my first PDA (Windows based Sharp) in the late 90’s, but that subject is for another day. The big thing that really sets the iPhone (and iPod Touch) apart from it’s predecessors and many other phones, is applications. Let’s face it, as cool as the iPhone is, it is loads cooler because you can choose from literally hundreds of thousands of applications to download and use, and the majority are either free or priced very low.
So, what does that have to do with my post? Well, the only “problem” that I ran into, or that irritated me (aside from the fact that I can’t mark all email read), was that I did most of my app downloading on the iPhone itself. This means that my iTunes would always have merely a fraction of the apps showing compared to what I had installed on the iPhone. This made syncing less than fun, especially when I really wanted a copy of all of those apps that I paid for in case at some point down the line they dropped off of the store and I needed to re-install. Let me tell you, if you haven’t already tried it, doing that manually by comparing the two and installing the deltas one at a time sucks. Major.
Then I learned of a little feature in the iTunes app manager that saved the day, once you have your iPhone or iPod Touch plugged in (I disable automatic syncing of the device by the way) and the icon for the device is in the list above your playlists, simply right click there and choose “Transfer purchases”. Check the picture where it’s highlighted red. Voila! All of your apps get zinged over to iTunes from your iPod! Ain’t that just slick? That one tip has saved me hours of work, so I just had to pass it on to my readers. This by far seems to be the easiest (and only) way to transfer your apps from your iPhone or iPod Touch over to your iTunes library. Enjoy!
Neverwinter Nights 2 – Toolset Quick Reference
I am sure there are tons of Neverwinter Nights fans out there, for both the original and version 2. If anyone is interested in tinkering with the tool set for Neverwinter Nights 2, here is a handy wuick reference for you. Check it out …
Verizon Email Update and Solution
You have heard me share information about the fiasco that Verizon created. In case you haven’t heard, I’ll recap quickly. In the name of fighting SPAM, Verizon decided that they would block ALL port 25 SMTP traffic on their network for all of their ISP customers. That means that anyone and everyone that uses Verizon as their ISP (DSL, FIOS, Dial-up, etc) cannot use any third party mail server or service that is configured to use the industry standard port 25. That’s just plain stupid, but I have complained about that already.
I was in a quandary with this one, or maybe a catch-22 is a better term. If I didn’t do anything about this “problem” that Verizon created, then all the people that I host email services for that use Verizon as their ISP are now out of luck. They can’t send mail through their (read: my) mail servers. So, I can just change the port that sendmail listens on, right? Yeah, I could, and then my Verizon tethered customers can send mail again … but, all my other customers that don’t use Verizon have to change their email client settings too, since they would still be sending through port 25. OK, I didn’t want to go down that road. I wanted to fix the problem with the least impact on everyone. Continue reading
See If A Directory Exists In Visual Basic
Hi there, how about a close cousin to yesterdays Visual Basic function? In a previous post we showed you a function that will tell you whether or not a file does indeed exist. Well, here is another similar function, but it tells you whether or not a directory exists. This is another handy tool for all you code monkeys out there. It works much the same way, check it out below: