Info Tech for Non-Profits

Free conference meeting room work space for non-profits available in San Francisco from Metta Fund

If you are a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area and are looking for a meeting space for up to 40 people, then check out Metta Fund. It’s in the Financial District during business hours (M–F, 8:00–5:30) and has a bunch of amenities like WiFi, a projector, white boards, and a conference phone.

Reserve Metta Fund’s Community Room

Change the app that opens when you double-click a file on the Mac

I use TextWrangler as my main text editor on the Mac, VLC as my video player, and Pixelmator for image editing. I want my Mac to open files in these apps rather than the built in ones (TextEdit, QuickTime, and Preview respectively). To do this:

1. In the Finder, Select a file of the type you want to change
2. Get Info (Cmd I)
3. In the Open with section, choose the app you want to use
4. Click the Change All button
5. Click Continue in the confirmation dialog box

 

I’m going with Meraki for better network management, including QoS traffic shaping for optimal VoIP and voice/video conferencing

OK, I’ve had it with consumer-grade wifi routers. I’ve tried top-of-the-line for both NetGear and D-Link, and both I’ve found lacking.

I met with some fellow IT professionals at a forum in San Francisco and they all recommended Meraki. A Cisco professional consultant told me “if you don’t know networking use Meraki.” I think he was trying to say that real IT networking people don’t use Meraki. And maybe that’s true. But I’m definitely not one, nor do I aspire to become one. I am an all-around IT guy, and I wear dozens of different hats. I absolutely want a networking product that is easy to use, even if it is a bit more expensive and maybe doesn’t do all of the high-performance things that Cisco hardware does.

I attended one of the Meraki webinars yesterday, and so I have a free Meraki WiFi access point getting FedEx’ed to me. I’ll blog in the future about how that turns out. I think I need a router/DHCP server and a managed switch as well…

Get a free Meraki WiFi access point

Amazon shopping tip: “Date First Available” tells you how new a product is

I was recently shopping for external monitors. I knew the specs I wanted:

• 27" screen size
• QHD resolution (2560✕1440)
• DisplayPort input (so it will work at native resolution with the MacBook Air)

Even with all that—and filtering on Prime shipping and 4-star ratings—there are still several dozen to choose from.

So I click through to the details page, look at the review distribution (too many 1s and 2s is a bad sign), read the reviews (especially looking at the negative ones to see how much I agree with them).

But I also check out the Date First Available. There are a lot of older products on Amazon, and technology like displays advance rapidly. While they might have garnered a highly-rating several years ago, it’s not a good indicator of how good the product is in comparison to newer ones. All other things roughly equal, I go for the newer one.

Use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to view an old, previous version of a web site or web page

I just needed to reference how a particular page looked on our org’s site when we launched the new design back in 2013. Thankfully there is a tool for that.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Get a link to a previously sent Vertical Response email newsletter

When you are viewing your list of sent emails in Vertical Response, there is an Actions link for every email. Clicking it brings up a menu of actions, including View Email. Now you might think this would be the way to bring up the hosted version of that email so you can share that link with others. But you'd be wrong.

Instead, click on the name of the email to bring up the Dashboard view. In the left column under Email Actions, the last item is Share Email. Click that, and then copy the first link in the dialog (it should be a link to a page on vresp.com). It's a shortened link, but you could also just click it, let it expand into a new tab where you can verify it looks the way you want, and then copy the link from the URL bar.

Here is the VerticalResponse help page on this, just for completeness.

B&H Photo and Video is the best alternative to Amazon for computer and electronics gear

If you have Prime, Amazon is tough to beat for both price and quick delivery. However for some things, B&H Photo and Video is as good or even better.

I was trying to buy two new desktop setups for new employees at my org. I wanted to get 2 of the same displays for consistency, but Amazon was limiting me to just one for the model I wanted. Even more annoying, the "Prime" delivery for this particular monitor was 4–5 days. So I went over to B&H, found the same display for the same price. They offered UPS 3 day delivery, and the total price is cheaper since they don’t collect sales tax.

Shop at B&H Photo and Video

Add or edit SalesForce picklist items by clicking the field label, not the edit link

Bad UI here. If you are trying to customize the picklist values for a field on a SalesForce object, you of course go to Setup > Customize > [object] > Fields. However, when you scroll down to the field, there is an on-so-tempting Edit link sitting right there in the Action column. Resist! Click the link just to the right of it in the Field Label column to get to the page where you can add, edit, and delete list items.

Fix for email redirecting in Gmail account; it's NOT in Settings > Forwarding or Filters

We use Google Apps Suite here. There was an account set up before I joined that was automatically redirecting messages from the work account over to a personal account. This was done  way back in the day before browsers supported multiple profiles.

I was trying to stop the redirect, but there were no filters set up, I had turned off forwarding, and both POP and IMAP were turned off.

Turns out there is a setting for this in the Admin console. Click Users, then a specific user, the Account, and scroll down to the Email Routing section. There was another “destination” set up for her personal account, and the G suite email and inherited routes were both unchecked. I removed the additional destination and checked both of those checkboxes, and now everything is working as expected.

Fixed: Reboot a MacBook webcam FaceTime camera when it is not working

I had a Skype video conferencing call today, but the camera built into my MacBook wasn’t working. Opening the Terminal app and pasting in this command (and entering my administrator password) fixed it.

sudo killall VDCAssistant

Viewing news articles that are behind paywalls by using the Google Cache or an incognito / private browser window

I get it: media companies want to encourage people to pay to read their content. But they will often give you several free views per month (tracking views in a cookie). And pretty much every media site absolutely wants their content indexed by Google. You can use this to your advantage.

Search for the title of the article you want to view that is behind a paywall, then in the Google search results, click the arrow to the right of the link (shown in green) and click Cached.

Or if it's on a site like the NY Times where they give you a few free views and you have used yours up, open a private / incognito browser window then paste the link to the article in it.

Find out if your online account credentials have ever been compromised in a data breach hack

Here’s another good reminder to start using a password manager and 2-step authentication (most ideally with an authenticator app) if you aren't already. I've just listened to a pretty interesting story about a radio journalist getting his Uber account taken over by Russian hackers (episode 1, episode 2).

Long story short: if you reuse passwords across sites and those credentials were compromised in one of the many data breaches over the years, hackers can mess with you and your stuff.

One of the most important accounts to secure is the primary email account; If hackers get access to that, they can pretty easily go through the “forgot password” process to reset it and gain access to your other accounts.

You can see if your account info has ever been leaked in one (or more!) of the many major data breaches over the years at this site:

Have I Been Pwned?

Save image of a particular frame in YouTube video or watch in super slo-mo

Have you ever wanted to grab a specific frame from a YouTube video? Or maybe you are trying to see something that flashes by quickly, and you can't quite nail the timing on the pause button.

Head over to watchframebyframe.com, paste in the link to the video, and you're good to go.

Grabbing an image of frame from the paused video could be easier, but you can either just snap a screenshot and crop, or use Cmd Shift 4 on the Mac and drag out the area to grab.

watchframebyframe.com

TXT record for Google Webmaster Tools site verification fix for it not showing

I wanted to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. To do so, they make you verify that you own the domain by giving you a unique code to add to the DNS entry for the domain. You create TXT record, and paste the code in.

I had done that, but it just wasn't showing up. I had to contact support, and they helped me fix it.

The problem was I had a CNAME record for @ (which represents the naked domain, in this case it4np.com). Apparently this prevents any TXT records from showing up for the domain. Don't ask me why.

So the fix was to delete the CNAME and replace it with a simple URL redirect to www.it4np.com. Now create a CNAME for record www.it4np.com to the actual IP address or site where the content is actually hosted.

And lo! The TXT record magically appears and Google let's me in.

Hope this helps someone else trying to figure out why their TXT records aren't appearing to the world even though they are configured in your registrar.

 Postscript: and doing this also completely broke the styling on my site. So once Google confirmed, I switched it back. 

24meetings.com time zone converter for international meeting scheduling

24meetings.com is the best utility I've seen for quickly and easily converting time zones. It’s very useful for scheduling international phone/Skype calls.

24meetings.com