Restore the Outlook 2003 Desktop Icon

This is something that has always annoyed me with the latest Office release. For some reason Microsoft decided to remove their typical 'Namespace Icon' for Outlook, and instead only uses a shortcut. Not only is the shortcut ugly, but it doesn't allow you to right-click and choose properties to modify the mail profiles.
To add this icon back to the desktop, either download this .reg file and import, or make the change yourself using the two keys below. This change can also be made in HKLM so it applies to all users.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace{10120000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}]

This is one of the first things I do when re-installing a new PC, as I'm constantly needing to create and modify mail profiles for my daily breadwinning activities at a well known Fortune 100 computer corporation.

The same Name Space idea can be applied to FireFox as well, so that you don't get that annoying shortcut icon. See an article on that here.

How NOT to move a Blogger page

I found out something very unfortunate this weekend when assisting my pal, and fellow techblog contributer, Latin Jones move his blog to a dedicated host. Blogger allows you to either host your blog on their webspace, or on a webhost of your choosing using FTP. Previously LJ had his Lunchtime Review site hosted with Blogger at http://lunchtimereview.blogspot.com. We decided to buy lunchtimereview.com and move the Blog over to my webhost since I was recently increased from 5GB to 12GB. Everything was going fine until we went to preview the page. There were no images. When you move the Blog from their site to yours, it says it is publishing the blog, but it retains all of the HTML that points to the image locations on photos1.blogger.com. It seems that Blogger will only allow you to view these images when you post them on a blogspot.com site.

Our workaround was painful, and is still in progress. We used the firefox extension DownThemAll, to grab all the images from the old site, and then had to manually re-upload them to the new Blog. What a pain. Blogger really should make this more apparent when posting such FAQ articles like this one What happens if I switch publishing from Blogspot to another server. Maybe they should add something in bold that says:

Warning! If you move your Blog from blogspot.com to your own host, you will lose all of your images!

Best Affordable Web Host

I have been hosting my pages with Powweb for years now. When I first started I think I had a quota of 100MB. Powweb has since increased that ammount in leaps and bounds since then until it was increased from 2GB to 5GB. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better I received a message last night that all accounts have been increased to 12GB. That is insane! I have never had to pay a penny more for all this extra space. They offer monthly, quarterly, or yearly payment plans, a great interface for making DNS changes, MySQL databases etc. Definately a great host to check out!!!

Disable Synchronization Warnings in Windows XP

Offline files in windows XP can come in handy if you need to take your work home with you, but if you have any .mdb or .pst files in a folder that has been made available offline you'll get an annoying warning message every time you synchronize.

You can disable these warning messages by adding a registry key under
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SyncMgr

Create a new dword value called "KeepProgressLevel" and set its value to one of the following options.

1. - Pause on errors.
2. - Pause on warnings.
3. - Pause on errors and warnings.
4. - Pause and display info.

Option 1 will prevent any warning message from being displayed after the sync operation, but it will still display errors.