Forms are a great way to standardize information being gathered and used for any purpose. Excel is also a great tool for this as well. Unfortunately in todays easy to e-mail world people still would rather print out the form and fill it in by hand just to re-scan it into the computer or even worse fax it! Why is this? From what I have noticed and learned, it is because the extra steps required to save the form, open e-mail, compose the e-mail, select add an attachment, browse and find the attachment, and finally send of that internet message. Some of you may now be asking the question “How is printing it just to fill it out by hand and scan it in any easier?” The answer is simply the same technology that printed the form to begin with. Today’s copiers and multifunction devices have a very nice ability to scan directly to an attachment, or even better yet scan directly to an e-mail address. The problem is you end up with a hard to read eligible form, or a to light and distorted fax. What is the answer? Simple! Add a button to the bottom of the excel form to “Submit” (e-mail) the form using standard SMTP. Now the user fills out the form and only has one step to submitting….a button! This works great for about any form you want. Why did I come up with this? Well, where I work we fill out forms for all sorts of user equipment and new user requests. Now they can send the excel file straight to our support e-mail (which in turn goes directly to our help desk! I’ll give you some details about the form I used and the customizations that can be done.
Transcript of Steps after the break.
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I once read this on an Icon….
Dear Kate,
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.
Take Care,
John Appleseed
#ThankYouSteve
To start you need to know either the IP Address or Windows Computer Name of the remote machine you would like to add the network printer to. (I have had better lucking using the IP Address, simply ping the name to find) You also will need to know the path to the network printer. Take special note as case sensitivity seems to be relevant in my experience with this command. Once this information is obtained open up the good ol’ cmd.exe and lets get to work.
*000.000.000.000 represents your remote machines IP Address (can replaced with its Computer Name
**path\PNT# Represents the printer path followed by its name (PNT#)
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I have just recently received an e-mail claiming to be from UPS stating I had a package that could not be delivered. My e-mail happened to notice something odd and flagged it as “Junk Mail”. None-the-less I was curious. Not as to what my special package was, since I know the only thing I’m waiting for is coming via FedEx, but what this e-mail was actually arriving to me for. Looking into it I quickly realized that it was a fake. Use the following information to check your own e-mails coming “From” “UPS”.
To start with. The entire e-mail content was a single image that loaded. How you can tell if this is the case in your own e-mail is quite simple. In your mail client or web app you should have an option to either completely disable HTML e-mails, or to not load HTML images in an e-mail. This will then not display the “contents” of said UPS e-mail. A real e-mail from UPS will have text content not just an image of text.
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As Facebook continues to be even more and more popular, so does its integrated chat feature. The chat feature on Facebook sits in the bottom of the websites windows allowing you to continue browsing content and posts as you chat with friends, family, colleagues, and more. It also has a feature that allows you to pop the chat screens out into their own web browser window. This is a nice feature so you can continue to stay logged into the Facebook chat feature while browsing to your favorite internet sites as well. This is great until you accidentally close all of your browser windows and thus end your current chat sessions. Facebook offers a convenient little work around to this issues. Although it is not much talked about. Facebook has its chat also built off of the Jabber and XMPP protocols. What does this mean for the general public? This means you can use programs such as iChat on Apple, Pidgin on Windows, Pidgin on Linux, or any other chat program that can utilize the Jabber and/or XMPP protocols. Download any of these programs and use the settings as follows to set up your Facebook chat in a normal chat program.
Jabber
Screenname: facebookusername@chat.facebook.com
Password: yourfacebookpassword
Server: chat.facebook.com
Port: 5222
SSL: Do Not Use
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I figured a good way to start my blog would be to state my stance on the entire operating system battle. You know, the good ol’ “Windows runs your business world” and “You are just an Apple fanboy and will buy anything Steve Jobs says to buy” battle. Personally. I think the whole argument on all sides is pretty well useless. My honest feelings are that each operating system has its own perks, its own uses, and its own spot in the computer world.
I am going to start in an odd place. The “non-standard” operating systems. Those such as AS/400. Most typical users at home will have no idea what that is, and to be completely honest, that is just fine. There is no need for everyone to know. As a job has had me using AS/400 I have came to realize its simplicity and ability to run so strong on such little resources. It is a great system for those such as inventory databases.
We can move on to the somewhat common and familiar Unix/Linux distributions. To start with, these make great servers for file and web serving. As is right now I have an old Gateway machine set up with Linux for a production environment in my apartment. Also, a version of Linux is being used to manage my wireless router as well.
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