Author: Adam Fowler

Movie Ticket Competition for Australia! Merry Christmas :)

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Just running a quick 7 day competition for 2 free movie tickets in Australia to see how it goes.
I’ve got a few tickets I won’t get time to use in the month before they expire, so happy to send them to someone who wants them!
Comment on this post, then fill in the form. No sharing of page or anything else required!

Email address used to contact winner only, no signups to anything else unless you tick the option to do so.

Prize is:

2 Standard HOYTS Unrestricted Adult e-Cine Gift

Pass admission to a movie of your choice to enjoy

at HOYTS Cinemas across Australia

Expiring 13th January 2016.

Hoyts Movie Ticket Giveaway

 

Update 19th Dec 2015
The winner has been drawn! Congrats Chris L – tickets have been emailed. For those wondering, the draw was done automatically by gleam.io which is what you’re seeing in the widget. All I did was click the button to draw it :)

KB3114409 Causes Outlook 2010 to run in Safe Mode

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Appears to be a bad patch from Microsoft.

KB3114409 dated December 08 2015 has caused many users to only be able to launch Outlook in Safe Mode.

If you need to roll back, I wrote this recently on ‘Rolling back from a bad KB Update‘

Feel free to comment on your experience with this KB, I’ll update this post with any other information I find.

I also found this forum thread on Windows TenForums about the issue.

 

Update 10th December 2015:

Thanks for all the comments – glad it’s helped you all out. We’ll see if the patch gets reissued. Rehash of some of the details below:

Webmaster advises: This is being sold as an improvement: “Adds administrative support to prevent Outlook 2010 from booting into safe mode. Administrators set this function in some scenarios when they have add-ins that must be enabled.”

This technet article contains the key you can modify to stop Outlook going into Safe mode.

Alexej Kucher advises that: On a 64 bit machine with 32 Bit Outlook you have to create following registry key:
HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security\ DWORD: DisableSafeMode = 1

Wayne DeJulia advises that the command to uninstall is: msiexec /package {90140000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE} MSIPATCHREMOVE={14CDCBF7-3CCC-42E2-A5BB-2D4926E16FAA} /qn /norestart

boozydaboozer  advises: Looks like Microsoft has removed KB3114409 from Windows Update.

 

Update 6th Jan 2016
I’ve noticed clients keep getting prompted to uninstall this, so once your desktops are all unpatched, you will have to decline the update.

How Does NBN Get To Me?

Posted on by Adam Fowler

A lot of people have asked me questions like ‘What is NBN?’ or ‘How is it different’? Many people have had no exposure to the NBN so I thought I’d take the chance to briefly show how NBN gets to my house. I’ll speak in very general terms and avoid jargon as much as I can, and define a few commonly used terms.

For starters, NBN stands for ‘National Broadband Network’ – and without going into it’s entire poor history of how it got to where it is today, there’s a few different types of NBN:

Fixed Line

Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) – This is what I have, and it’s a fibre cable run from the exchange (as in, telephone exchange) all the way to your house. It’s considered the best generally.
Fibre To The Node (FTTN) – This is another fibre cable run, but goes to a node (a cabinet somewhere in your neighbourhood, closer than the exchange), and from there goes to copper to your house (i.e. your phone line).
Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) Cable – This is the older cable that Telstra and Optus use for Internet as well as Pay TV.

Wireless

Fixed Wireless – This invovles an antenna being placed on your premises, which gets signal from a base station. Speeds are much lower (max 25mbit down) than Fixed Line options, with higher latency.
Satellite – A dish is used rather than an antenna, and your data goes via a Satellite floating above the earth. Similar download speeds to Fixed Wireless but latency should be worse.

Personally I am lucky enough to have the pinnacle of NBN options – FTTP. A delicate thread of glass runs it’s way from the exchange all the way to the inside of my house.

Since I can’t get into the exchange easily, the journey of my fibre stars running along the telephone poles (many places have it underground instead) to the one outside my house:

20150822_151438Look at all those beautiful wires!

From there, just like the old copper cable, the fibre gets strung across to the corner of the roof. The highly professional ‘metal hook with weight thingy’ keeps the cable in place:

20150822_151417Wires everywhere

From the corner of the roof, the fibre is fed down into the NBN utility box (aka Premises Connection Device – PCD). Black cable in, white cable out. What magic happens in the middle? I don’t know as I couldn’t find anything online, but it most likely draws the line between the in-premise side of the fibre, and the off-premise fibre run.

20150822_151405Upside-down NBNCo PCD

From the PCD, the cable is then run into the roof cavity to get to the NBN Connection box. You’ll need a reasonable amount of wall space, and some ventilation room for this one:

20150813_124251Left: NBN Connection box. Right: Power Supply with Battery Backup (optional)

Taking the cover off of the NBN Connection box, you can see the little blue fibre cable being fed from the white shielding, looped around and fed into the Network Termination Device. Fibre is very delicate, with the added bonus of being able to blind yourself if you look into the end:

20150813_124315NBN Connection box with cover taken off

Here’s the below view of the Network Termination Device (NTD) inside the NBN Connection box. The first two ports on the left are voice ports, for a standard telephone service. Next up are the 4 broadband ports – my blue cable feeds off to a normal ADSL type router, that works with a WAN connection (such as NBN). Beyond that is the white power cable and of course the fibre cable. Note that you can’t just plug in to any port, the ISP will enable a particular port for you to use (or in my case from Internode, they’ll tell you ‘UNI-D 2’ on the paperwork but actually have ‘UNI-D 1’ as the active port!). You can have up to 4 seperate internet connections from this, but they’ll be on 4 separate bills.

20150813_124420Lower view of the NTD

Lastly, the Power Supply with Battery Backup. This is optional, but didn’t cost me anything extra. If there’s a power outage, this will give me 12 hours or so of power to the NTD. Handy just in case (keep in mind you’ll need some sort of power for your own router too for internet):

20150813_124331Big warning on the Battery Backup

With all this in place, and a high speed internet plan, this is the sort of speed I now get:

Faster than 98% of AU! :)

Without getting too political, if you don’t have FTTP NBN, you probably won’t get it in future, instead it’ll most likely be FTTN.

For details, check out http://www.nbnco.com.au/ as they’ve got a lot of good resources around the NBN.

Happy Internetting everyone!

Outlook Cannot Send This Item

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft Outlook has a reasonably common, yet very generic error:

cannotNo Outlook, it was not helpful.

There are a bunch of reasons that can cause this error. Often, the ‘solution’ is to change the email from HTML to Rich Text or Plain Text, and move on. Or, copy/paste the entire email into a new email and move on. Neither of these are workarounds of course.

Dig a bit deeper on the web, and you’ll find some wackier reasons – the size of the logo in your signature for example. There was also a version of Exchange 2010 that caused the issue, but that was resolved.

I was running into this problem on a regular basis, and spent many hours trying to come up with a reason for the issue, and why only certain users had the issue, and on certain emails. I couldn’t reproduce on my own PC with the exact same emails, yet it was 100% reproducible on theirs. Also, if I removed the image from the user’s signature it fixed it – and it didn’t matter what image I put back in, it was always broken.

It wasn’t until I cried out for help on Twitter, and Christopher Kusek came to the rescue. After looking at a few other ideas, he pointed me towards hotfix KB3042197 with the lengthy title “ Graphics file attachment grows larger in the recipient’s email message after you change to a high DPI setting”

After reading this, I did some testing. Amazingly, the problem only occurred when the PC’s DPI setting was above 100%. Amazingly, when DPI is 125%, 150%, 200% etc, Word from inside Outlook resizes images in the HTML code based on your DPI setting. Some combination of HTML emails back and forth, and this resizing would cause the ‘Cannot send this item’ message.

Setting the DPI to 100% wasn’t enough either, as it would make the contents of the screen too small for some users. The registry setting mentioned on the KB article ‘DontUseScreenDpiOnOpen’ and setting the value to 1 (true) actually fixed it!

After some more testing, this single registry setting which you’d think would be on by default was rolled out, and the ‘Cannot send this item’ messages were no longer appearing. At least not for this particular problem!

TLDR: If Windows is set to > 100% DPI, the MS Word editor inside Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 will resize images by default and this can cause weird stuff to happen.

Testing Twitter Influence – Part Three

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Read parts One and Two

As mentioned in Part Two, I wanted to test how well paying $5 for a bunch of clicks to your site went. I paid another US$5 for someone selling  ‘I will do social media marketing campaign within my 9M Facebook and Twitter fans’ – sounds rather dubious.

I gave them a URL on my website: http://www.adamfowlerit.com/dirty/ which contains a cute picture of a rabbit, and waited to see what happened.

I can’t find any records of this link being shared in social media, but they somehow managed to generate a bunch of hits, over a 4 day period. Funnily enough, after this there is absolutely zero hits:

Traffic to the URLTraffic to the specific URL

The seller also created a pretty graph via Google Analytics apparently showing where the clicks came from, passing it through a shortened URL:

traffic3Google Analytics of URL traffic

I’m reasonably confident all this traffic was faked, along with the sources, browsers, countries etc. None of that is overly difficult to fake.

Thirdly, here’s the overall traffic to my website with the ‘marketing campaign’ hits rather obviously in the middle:

traffic1Overall Site Hits

Traffic after the campaign ended went back to normal. As a side note, it’s interesting to see the dips on my site over the weekend, versus the buildup during the week to Wednesday. This cycle is consistent unless I publish a popular article, or gets picked up by a news site or reddit (it occasionally happens!).

Two major points I take away from this – it’s easy and cheap to generate ‘traffic’ which appears real and varied, and don’t believe any claim in traffic or hits, even if you see the end results.

Back on the Twitter front, I’ve done absolutely nothing with @AdamFowlerITCom but it’s looking more legitimate to me. I’m getting what appears to be more real followers (or good fake ones) as well as thanks for adding people to a list from an automated method:

twitter1Twitter Notifications

I think I’ve set out what I planned to achieve – showing that it’s very easy to build up an appearance of having huge numbers of followers, and unless someone digs deep it will appear to be legitimate after you get real followers on the account too. Also, fake traffic is incredibly cheap to generate – so take everything with a grain of salt.