Dude, Where's My Phone (or Tablet)?

Earlier this week Google released Android Device Manager, an online tool to locate misplaced Android devices.  This handy little tool will let you:

• locate your phone or tablet on a map in real time  (if you think you left it somewhere),
• ring it at max volume (if it’s misplaced - yes, you could call it from another phone, but this will override ‘Silent’ or ‘Vibrate Only’ so it will ring , or
• erase it (if it's been stolen or is otherwise unrecoverable).

You will need to set up the erase feature on your device, but the locator and ring features work without any setup.

You can read the announcement or just go ahead and play with it.

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Going Hands-On with Google Chromecast

OK - let's start with the basics:
Chromecast is a $35 dongle that you plug into an HDMI port on your HDTV and it allows you to use your phone, tablet or laptop to stream (cast) content to your TV screen. It will cast content from Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Play Music. Google promises more apps, like Pandora, coming soon.

Something that Google doesn't mention is that almost anything that plays natively in a Chrome browser window can be cast to the TV.  So if you've got a file living on your device that will open in Chrome you can probably cast it.  I've easily sent JPG pictures,  MP3 music, and M4V video from my laptop. I haven't yet done an exhaustive test of file types, but I have found that Quicktime (MOV) files are not supported.

As far as devices, it works with Android 2.3+, iOS 6.0+, Windows 7+, Mac OS 10.7+ and Chromebook Pixel, with additional Chromebook support coming soon.

It transmits video content at up to 1080p resolution via its HDMI port and draws power through its USB port from your HDTV or the supplied external power adapter. It supports 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n.

In the box you get:

• the Chromecast device
• an HDMI extension cable
• a USB power cord
• a power supply

Setup is quick and easy.  It took just about 3 minutes from opening the box 'til I was casting from my laptop.

1. Plug the power cord into the dongle and into a USB port on your TV.
   Don't use the Service port.  If your set doesn't have a USB port, use the included power supply.  
2. Switch your TVs source to the input you plugged the device into
3. Go to google.com/chromecast/setup to download the app to configure the device

Follow the instructions to get the caster on your WiFi network and your pretty much done. One additional step to cast from your computer.  You'll need to install the Google Cast extension for Chrome.

Once you have Chromecast up and running it is found by your devices' YouTube, Play, etc. apps. Around the castle here, the prince and princesses are all wired up and their iOS and Android tablets, phones and such all can cast without having to install anything.

One thing to note - since all the devices can cast and there's no 'lockout', they can bump each other off the TV screen.  If Princess1 casts from her phone and Princess2 doesn't like the video, Princess2 can start a cast from her tablet and bump Princess1's video off the TV.

Maybe Google would consider a Chromecast Combo Pack including a striped shirt and a whistle?

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Google+ Hangouts Adds Remote Desktop

Google has added a couple of new enhancements to the Hangouts.  You can now connect to another user's computer and control it with their permission.  (Think remote TA)

They've also increased the number of telephone connections to a Hangout from 2 to 5.  So now there's more space for people that are away from their connected devices, but have a phone and want to participate.  More details on the Google+ Daily blog.

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The Twinkies are Coming!!

Okay, so a bit off topic from my usual posts, but you've got to acknowledge the important things in life.

The new Hostess company announced last week that it is going to reopen bakeries in Kansas and Georgia.  They announced today that they'll also be opening bakeries in Illinois and Indiana.  They're starting to staff up now and might have bakeries open by the end of May.  The goal is to have Twinkies, HoHos and all the rest back in stores by late July.

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Hotfix for CF Admin Console Vulnerability

Adobe has released a hotfix to address a vulnerability in ColdFusion 10, 9.0.2, 9.0.1 and 9.0 (for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX) whereby an attacker could impersonate an authenticated user and potentially gain access to a secured website/application or ColdFusion’s administrative console.

Take a look at Adobe's Security Bulletin, and  the Tech Note for more information and to download and install the patch.

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Deleting a Printer that Just Won't Go Away

Have you ever had a problem deleting a printer?

I'd physically gotten rid of an old printer, but I couldn't delete it from my Windows 7 computer; no matter how many times I tried, it just wouldn't go away.

If you're having a similar problem, here's how I cleared it up.

There was a document in the queue that I'd cancelled, but it wouldn't drop.  That was holding the printer.  I needed to force the print spool to release the document, so the system would drop the printer.  A command file would do the trick.  Here's what to do:

Open notepad and paste in these 4 lines

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler

Save the document as deletePrinter.cmd
Right-click the file you just created and select 'Run as administrator'

You may need to restart your computer afterwards, but that will delete any print jobs and the printer should be gone.

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Need to Open Up Space on an iOS Device? PhoneClean 2.0

I was doing some Groundhog Day cleaning on my iPad, you know, moving photos, videos, and such off to get back a little storage space.  When I was done, I saw that I had nearly 5 gig of space being eaten up by 'Other'.

Some of that space usage is legit.  Application data, contacts and the like. But devices can accumulate quite a bit of detritus just from day-to-day usage; temp files, caches, off-line files, cookies, scripts, and corrupt media files from failed iTunes syncs.

So I took a little walk around the Interwebs to see if there was something that would survey my storage and assess what it found.

I came across a little freeware tool called PhoneClean that seemed to be just what I was looking for, so I decided to go ahead and give it a whirl.  You can download PhoneClean directly from the developer’s website.  PhoneClean is available for both Windows PC and Mac.  Once installed onto your computer, it’s just a few steps to run through the files on your device and scrub the unneeded ones.

So here we go:

1. Back up your device.
        Before I do anything that might fubar my data I always do a backup.  I used iTunes to sync my iPad so I'd be able to rollback if this didn't go well.
2. Connect your device to the computer
3. Launch PhoneClean.
   You'll get a screen similar to this:

          You can see how much free space you have, and you can select what type of file to look for.

4. Start the scan.
   When it's done you'll get a screen showing how much space can be freed up and what apps have files that can be deleted:

          Clicking on any of the apps will show you what files can go.

          And you have complete control of which files are removed and which ones stay.

5. Click Clean Up to start the process of deleting the files.
             When it's all done you'll see a confirmation of how much space was freed up.

When I ran PhoneClean it about 20 minutes all together to scan and clear out the files.  In the end it opened up 2.89GB space.

Definitely worth the time and the price is right.

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CFIMAP, SSL, and CACERT

I was working on a little ColdFusion project the other day.  Something rather uncomplicated actually.  We needed to write an application that would:

1. automatically check a mailbox for messages
2. parse information from valid messages into a database
3. move those messages from the Inbox to another folder
4. delete any other messages from the box

Simple enough to do; now time to test.

I kick-off the process and -

An exception occurred when setting up mail server parameters.
This exception was caused by: javax.mail.MessagingException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path validation failed: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Path does not chain with any of the trust anchors;

Well yippee, CF doesn't have the mail server's cert in its list.  This'll be fun- go generate a cert file and try to remember the command line to install it in CF's stores.

"But wait" says a friend, "there's an app for that" :) .  She clues me in on a little tool called KeyStore Explorer that's much better than all the command line stuff.    I take her advice (my friends are very smart) and grab a download at http://www.lazgosoftware.com/kse/index.html to check it out.  A couple of minutes later I point the tool at the cacerts file  (%cfroot%/jre/lib/security/cacerts) and install the mail server's cert.  No muss, no fuss, no bother.

The parser is humming along like it should and I'm on to the next 'to-do'.

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Finding Empty ntext and varchar Fields in SQL

Just the other day, I ran into another one of those little ‘slips your mind until you need it’ items.

In SQL, when checking for empty (no, NOT null, empty) fields with data types of ntext or varchar, querying for >’’ is not valid.

So, how can I find the records with empty fields? The test here would be to check for ANY string.

Well, LIKE ‘_%’ would be the way to do it.

For example, looking for records with an empty 'description' field (data type ntext) in a table with 200 entries:

SELECT * FROM widgets WHERE description IS NULL OR description NOT LIKE ‘_%’ 

would return the 17 records with empty or null description fields.

Conversely,

SELECT * FROM widgets WHERE description LIKE ‘_%’

would return the 183 records where there is something in the description field.

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Price Increase on Windows 8

If you're interested in picking up a license for Windows 8 now's the time to do it. Microsoft has announced an increase of $160 that will take effect on February 1st. The retail price will jump from $40 to $200. Here's the breakdown:

• The Windows 8 Pro upgrade edition will be available online and at retail for $199.99 
• The Windows 8 upgrade edition will be available online and at retail for $119.99 MSRP 
• The Windows 8 Pro Pack will cost $99.99
• The Windows 8 Media Center Pack will cost $9.99

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