Vista no longer recognizing my "Card" reader after using Safely Remove Harware

So tonight I ran into a problem I had a few months back and I could not recall immediately what the solution was, so in the middle of 2 hours of searching various microsoft and HP forums for support, I thought that I definitely need to post the answer here once I find it....

The problem: inserting my memory card into the card readers on the front of my HP Pavilion did not bring up the Auto-Play option. Furthermore, after opening Windows Explorer the drives were no longer listed. Several of the posts I had found mentioned restarting the machine, some mentioned "uninstalling" all the USB devices in the Device Manager, but the one key item that I still could not find the original source was the "hold down the power switch for 4 seconds after shutdown". I have no idea what that does, but it seems to me to act like "cache" flush and Presto!! My drives magically appeared again.

Well, if when I get this again I should be able to remember to check here.

HP forum note that I thought I had found the answer earlier on.

My new computer set up

I recently purchased a new desktop machine and was well into getting it all customized to the way I liked, when the lousy thing crapped out on me and I lost the apps and settings I painstaking setup. So following an example from another blogger, I thought I'd track the updates and configurations here to help me recall them.

• A favorite text editor with a good regular expression tool: notepad++
• A decent listing of good freeware: Gizmo
• PC Tune Up: Advanced Window Care
• Finance Software: GnuCash http://www.gnucash.org/
• PDF Editor: Jarnal (may want to try looking at:PDF-XChange_) I've used PDF-XChange a couple of days nows and runs pretty quick and it works well under wine in Kubuntu. This looks like my new favorite (although merging files is a PRO addin that I may switch back to JARNAL for)
  
• OCR PDF (just found haven't tried it): http://www.softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm
• Office Suite- OpenOffice and now IBM supported Symphony
• Gimp for photo editing
• Sticky Notes
• Wink for screen session recording
• I can't recall which Virtual Desktop Manager I started to use previously, but will Dexpot.
• Will be tempted to set up AutoHotKey for macro enabling various programs, perhaps for passwords or other navigation items.
• Comodo Firewall
• Avast Antivirus
• AntiSpyware- http://www.superantispyware.com/index.html
• Adaware - http://lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
• Disk Defargger - http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/
• Disk Cleaner - http://www.ccleaner.com/
• Registry Cleaner - http://www.wisecleaner.com/index.html
• Should take a look at the all in one cleaner - http://www.glaryutilities.com/
• Video Format converter: http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/ ...
  Super (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer)
  Website: http://www.erightsoft.net
• I need to get a better backup regimen going so will be looking at: WinBackup
  Website: http://www.liutilities.com/
  Download link: http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?27000000036770
  Alternative Download link: http://www.filefactory.com/file/d6ff2f/
• Email Client - Thunderbird
• IM Client - I used to like Pidgin (mainly from Linux install), but will look at Digsby
  Website: http://www.digsby.com/ based on the recommendation from the Gizmo site
• Skype
  
• Juice podcast catcher
  

Thats the start of the items I need to get working on.

Firefox addins follow up

Some additional addons that I like are:

SuperDrag & Go: Now called QuickDrag

Web Developer Tool Bar:

Colorful Tabs

Status Bar Download

Create your own album cover

From eKrantz.com | Family, Comments and Tutorials:

Here's a fun exercise to kill 10 minutes. Create your own personal album cover...

"# Go to Wikipedia’s random article page. The first article you get is the name of your band.
# Go to the Random Quotations page. The last four words of the last quote is the album title.
# Go to Flickr’s Interesting photo page. Third picture, no matter what it is, is your album cover.
# Put it all together to make your album. Either crop it to CD cover size, or just use the raw image itself … the only rule is you’re only allowed to add the album title and artist title."

Ok, I modified the rules for myself, my random article hit on an actual band name, so I hit it again.

Thinking of moving these tech notes over to www.BleedYellow.com

Lotus911 is now making available to the Lotus community a fully functional version of the Lotus Collaboration software, Lotus Connections, at the site BleedYellow.com I am considering moving either this content, or at least the important items over to this site to take advantage of the platform that I enjoy.

I have a lot to catch on from Lotusphere2008 wrap up on my company blog and sleep is calling...

FreeMind move example

This is the first FreeMind mind map with aout upcoming move. Testing it out here to see how it looks.

Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10 >> Mixed Signals >> Rupert Goodwins's Blog at ZDNet UK Community

Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10 >> Mixed Signals >> Rupert Goodwins's Blog at ZDNet UK Community: "Monday 22 October 2007, 1:43 AM Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10 Posted by Rupert Goodwins "

I nice discussion on the differences in experiences with Ubuntu & Vista.

How to Use Lotus Notes on Linux with Wine

How to Use Lotus Notes on Linux with Wine:

Julian's Notes are from 2005 and were a great starting point. A few updates:

The regression bug mentioned has been corrected, fixed, and rolled into the latest version of wine. So using the latest version of wine was all that was needed (also current version of wine consists of just one file "wine" no longer need to get the 3 packages separately).

I did not follow the steps for the wine configuration part (step 8) as I think the wine configuration is different in the latest version.

I just loaded it and will have a later update once I use it for a while.

Howto Set Up and sync a Palm PDA [Archive] - Ubuntu Forums

Howto Set Up and sync a Palm PDA [Archive] - Ubuntu Forums

From the above linked article:

1 - Plug the usb cable into the usb port on your computer.

2 - Put your Palm in the cradle or plug in the cable.

3 - Go to System->Preferences->Palm OS Devices

4 - In the Pilot Settings pop-up select the Devices tab and click Add.

5 - In the Device Settings pop-up enter info as follows:

Name: Cradle
Port: /dev/ttyUSB0 <--*see bottom Speed: 57600 Timeout: 2 Type: USB Click OK and then click Add again and enter: Name: Cradle1 Port: /dev/ttyUSB1 <--*see bottom Speed: 57600 Timeout: 2 Type: USB 6 - Now, back in the Pilot Settings window select Pilots and click Add 7 - Once the new pop-up appears, press Synchronize on your PalmPDA While it is searching, select "Get from pilot" in the pop-up window just mentioned. Your computer should synchronize and get a Name, ID and username from your PDA. Now your device officially exists in the gpilot database on your computer. 8 - Close the most recent pop-up. You should still have the main Pilot Settings window open. Click the Conduits tab to decide what you want to synchronize and so on...this is essentially the same as what you may have used on other OS's. Finally: Every time you want to sync, make sure gpilot is running and then hit the sync button on your PDA.

This started to work on my Palm TX but is currently stopping the middle. I had this working a few months back, but don't regularly sync up. Just a quick note here so I would know where I found the original information

Annotating PDFs

Annotating PDFs: Linux

Some good options... I got Jarnal Working and going to test out pdf edit..

Annotating PDFs

Dru (SysAdmin, Technical Writer, Technical Trainer) Posted 7/7/2007
Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

A new Ubuntu user asked me the other day how to annotate PDFs on her system. She does a lot of collaboration and hadn't yet found a non-Windows way to annotate PDFs.

I tried a few tools this morning and by far the easiest one to use is Jarnal. This one is Java based so you'll need java installed on your system. (FreeBSD users can download Java packages from the Foundation and PC-BSD users can install the Java PBIs.) Ubuntu instructions appear to be here though I have not tried them myself.

Once Java is installed, create a directory for the Jarnal files; I created a subdirectory of my home directory:

mkdir ~/jarnal && cd jarnal

I then downloaded the zip file to that subdirectory , unzipped it and set the bash script as executable:

unzip jarnal-install.zip
chmod +x jarnalannotate.sh

BSD users: bash isn't installed by default but can be installed with pkg_add -r bash. The path to bash will be incorrect in the script. Edit that file to change the first line to read #! /usr/local/bin/bash. If you're not sure where bash is installed on your Linux system, which bash will give you the path.

Now, run the script with:
./jarnalannotate.sh

While annotating itself is very easy, figuring out how to open and save the PDF wasn't as intuitive. To open an existing PDF, use File->Open Background. Select the Text tool (black T icon on far right), click where you want to type with your mouse, and start typing your annotation. When you are finished and want to save your file, use File->Export->Export to PDF.

TomKa writes:

8/9/2007 #

Take a look at this.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PDFedit
I found it vesy usefull.