| 2012-05-10 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT, Tips |
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Today I’ve experienced, again, the problem with Excel that it was calculating formulas only after clicking save, not while entering data. As it was pretty annoying I’ve googled the solution, it was for some ancient version of Excel, but I was able to adjust it to 2010 version. Here you go:
1. Go to Formulas -> Calculation Options.
2. Set it to Automatic.
It switches to manual if you open Excel file where somebody set it like that. Why people are doing it, I don’t know. Enjoy!
| 2012-03-26 | Posted by Peter under Hunger Games, Movies, Polskie blogi IT, spoilers |
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At first I must admit that I haven’t read the book. I wanted to as it was recommended by a lot of people whose opinion I value. But the way it’s written is not acceptable for me. Narration is in first person in present time. I’ve considered audiobook for a while, but decided that I even can’t listen to it. Anyway, to my rescue movie was released. I don’t know how much it’s basing on book, but I believe it’s pretty much it.
It’s beginning slowly with introduction of the world where districts must send their children to fight for death. Generally it’s populated by poor ones and there is minority of insanely rich (and indeed insane) in Capitol. You can feel the tension and lack of hope. There is also complicated relation between our heroin and her mother which is not exactly explained, but I believe book covers it. Scene of choosing “fighters” has been well done and I’ve bought it. They could disallow this guy to walk Katniss’s sister to her mother. Boy hasn’t yet been chosen, so they shouldn’t allow them to walk around. But it’s just book for kids.
Central part of the movie is filled with training, introduction of our heroes and battle. Or rather survival camp with addition of fights. Training part is alright. Introduction of the fighters as well. We learn more about the world, however not so much. It’s a little too long, but not so long to make one yawn. The action part is “fun”. Sometimes it’s maybe to touchy, but I’ve enjoyed it. It started correct emotions in me and I like to feel something when watching a movie. It doesn’t happen a lot recently, that’s a pity.
And then there was ending. I know that it’s book for teenagers and probably competitor of Twilight, but after such a good story ending should be better. As Peeta character was pretty shady I’ve thought that there would be some twist involving him, but no. Then as he said at the beginning of training that he would want to do something that would show authorities that they don’t own him, I’ve thought that in final scene he would throw himself with this bad guy into the jaws of “monsters” to save the lady. But no. Instead we’ve had a touchy ending using poisonous berries as a tool to extort release of both of them (Romeo and Juliet?). I know that it leaves open doors and there is second part to the story. But it could be so much more interesting the other way, and still second part could be quite interesting and possible.
I must also say that I’m shocked with what they’ve did to Elizabeth Banks, who is real beauty, in this movie. She wears more or less a ton of make-up, hideous clothes and anti-rapes (we call this stockings-like socks like that in Poland). At first I haven’t even recognized her. I would have to check in book if this character really looks like that.
And Woody Harrelson, he was awesome in this picture. But he usually is.
Yeah, I know that I’m whining (as usual) and author probably knows better (she sold a lot of books after all), but I’ve felt that something is missing after story has finished. Still it was great 2+ hours of fun and both me and my wife gave it 8/10.
| 2012-02-07 | Posted by Peter under battlefield 3, games, origin, Polskie blogi IT |
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I’ve recently bought Battlefield 3 and had rather unpleasant opportunity of playing with Origin. Maybe it’s because I’ve bought my copy from third party, not directly from EA, but I’ve had problems with activation. And not only with that. After installation game didn’t want to run at all. But a restart of OS helped here. When I’ve finally launched the game I’ve received such message.
Unfortunately Enter Product Key gave me nothing, so I’ve spent more than an hour searching Internet for solution. Without results. But one of proposed solutions gave me idea, so here is how I’ve solved it:
1. Close Origin if it’s running.
2. Block Origin from connecting to Internet, you can do it in Windows Firewall with advanced settings (you must block both incoming and outgoing connection).
3. Launch the game via bf3.exe.
4. You’ll see message that you can activate the game using your EA account (create one if you don’t have it), log in.
5. After activation you’ll be able to play, but only in single player mode. So unblock Origin in firewall and launch the game through it.
It worked like a charm, but I was close to giving up. Game is great, so it was worth to fight for it though. Enjoy!
But I must say that the thing that user who is buying legitimate copy of a game, not downloading illegal one, must go through all these troubles pretty sucks.
| 2012-01-28 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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In Office 365, like in any other hosted exchange service, you can create multiple aliases for your account. You just need to (while logged into OWA, you must have admin rights):
1. Go to Options -> See All Options…
2. Choose Manage My Organization.
3. In Mailboxes section of Users & Groups select your mailbox and click Details.
4. Expand E-Mail Options, click Add, enter your new name for email address, choose domain (if you have more than one), click OK. Now Save.
Voila! You got new alias on which you can receive emails. And that’s the problem, you can only receive. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to send emails from such alias. Fortunately there is solution to that, but not with aliases. You must use groups instead. Repeat two first steps mentioned above and then:
1. In Users & Groups click Distribution Groups.
2. Click New and fill in Display name, Alias, E-mail address. Click Save.
3. Now select your newly created group and click Details.
4. Expand Delivery Management and check Senders inside and outside of my organization. Click Save.
You now have a group which can receive emails from outside of your domain. As you’re the only member of this group you actually have email alias. But you’re still unable to send emails as this group.
What you’ll need to do now is a little more complicated than clicking options in menus, but have no fear it’s not rocket science. Let’s proceed:
1. Go to Start Menu -> Accessories -> Windows PowerShell and launch Windows PowerShell.
2. Type this command “$LiveCred = Get-Credential” and hit enter. It would open window where you need to input your admin credentials to O365.
3. Now you need to execute this command to connect to the service “$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection“. You’ll receive warning message, but don’t be afraid, it’s just telling you that you’ve been redirected to proper server.
4. Execute “Import-PSSession $Session“. To import commands you’ll use to manage your O365 from PowerShell. It can take a while, so be patient.
5. Now is time to give you permissions to send emails as a group. Execute “Add-RecipientPermission “group@dot.com” -AccessRights SendAs -Trustee “me@dot.com“. You’ll need to confirm it. Of course you need to replace group@dot.com with address of your group and me@dot.com with your email address in O365 from which you want to send emails as a group.
That’s it. You can now send emails from group’s email address. In OWA you just need to click From when creating new message and if your group is not on the list select Other e-mail address, then double click on given group so it would appear in From field at the bottom and click OK. In Outlook procedure is pretty the same, you’ll just need to select the group from Global Address List.
I find this functionality really useful and I hope that so would you. Enjoy!
| 2012-01-18 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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This is email I’ve received from Amazon today:
Hello from Amazon.com,
As a subscriber to Gazeta Wyborcza, we wanted to let you know that we had three days of missed delivery in the last month. Because of this, we are refunding you one month’s subscription charges. We have fixed the underlying cause of this problem and it should not happen again.
Thank you for being a Kindle customer.
Amazon.com
It’s really good to know that there still are decent companies in the world.
| 2012-01-17 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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Many domain registrars (or at least the ones I’m using) don’t provide domain hosting. So you’re unable to create any records for your domain, you can just change name servers for it. In most cases it’s fine as most of hosting providers gives ability to manage DNS records, so you just need to update name servers in your registrar control panel.
Sometimes however it’s not enough. For instance if you want to use your domain in Office 365 you need first verify that it’s yours. In order to do so you need to create TXT or MX record with value provided by O365 setup process. Of course if your registrar doesn’t offer domain hosting you’re unable to do so.
Here comes cloudns.net, free domain hosting service I’ve googled. Procedure is pretty simple:
1. In Dashboard create new zone (your domain).
2. Change name servers in your registrar to cloudns name servers (there are 4, but you don’t have to use all).
3. Create record as per instructions provided by O365.
4. After your domain would be verified by O365 (or any other service) you can change name servers to the ones provided by it, or stay with cloudns, it’s up to you.
I’ve tried it and it works! And it saved me a lot of time and nerves.
| 2012-01-02 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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I saw following search phrase in Google Analytics “fb.liox.eu is it safe” for my site. I’ve checked it in Google if you can learn anything about it from other sites and as I’ve expected, you can’t (my site isn’t too popular after all). So let me try to answer it. I know that I wouldn’t be objective as site is mine, but I’ll try to reply as best as I can.
First of all, I don’t fully understand what should it mean that it’s safe. It’s site which hosts your text and allows you to share it on Facebook or Twitter. It does nothing else. If you want to know if there is any malicious code in it, I can tell you that there isn’t, but you can only rely on my word on this matter as it hasn’t been checked by any third party so far. If you’re worried, you can always block JavaScript on it (using special add-on in your browser), you’ll loose this “cool” window which appears after clicking Tweet button, but you’ll feel safer. Other than that there is only small piece of JS for Google Analytics and I don’t mind if you’ll block it as stats for this site are pretty poor anyway. Rest of the site is written entirely in PHP, so code is executed on the server not in your browser.
If you’re worried about your content. Well, it’s not a place to keep anything sensitive. Anybody who knows the address to your text can access it. It would be rather hard to guess as it consist of quite long hash, but if you’ll share link on other page there is always possibility that it could be accessed by someone who shouldn’t read it. Good advice, if you’re worried about your text being read by someone who shouldn’t don’t put it here. I’m also not interested in your content, so you don’t have to worry about me stealing your work. But as it was mentioned earlier I can’t promise that somebody else wouldn’t “steal” it.
Last thing I can think of is abuse. If you feel that any text hosted on the site is abusive, breaks the law, is offending you, etc. please send email to fb(at)liox.eu and after analyzing your request I’ll either delete mentioned text or leave it.
I hope that I’ve put at least ray of light on the matter. If anyone has questions please put them in the comments and I’ll try to reply.
As this is first post in 2012 let me wish you a Happy New Year!
| 2011-12-13 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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I’ve read interesting article recently about improvements in Google Search. Especially interesting was part about ability to provide image as search input. So I’ve did a small test, I’ve provided my avatar to Google and you can see results below.
As you can see results are not perfect (to say the least), but it’s interesting (and a little bit creepy) technology.
| 2011-12-08 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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Everybody who is interested in Android world probably knows about it already, but I’ve decided to write about it as well. Android Market has big promotion going on right now. It’s 10 days of offers with Premium Apps for 90% less. In practice all apps are for 0.10 $ each:) And each day you have 10 new apps added! I’ve already bought SwiftKey X Keyboard and Read It Later Pro, and I believe it’s not the end of my shopping spree:)
One “problem” though. I don’t know why, but Market’s page is not refreshing for me. So I’m tracking new additions on Andoird Police. But I can live with that. Bravo to Google for great Christmas presents!
| 2011-12-02 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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Recently I’ve bought ezPDF Reader as I was pretty frustrated with the way Adobe Reader is navigating through PDFs. I’ve bought full version, because I’ve thought why not. It’s cool to add some notes from time to time and it’s not so much more expensive than Lite version.
There is one glitch however. When I’m opening PDF which was scanned (not created from real text) in Adobe Reader and zooming it, reader is trying (and usually succeeds) to smooth the text. When doing the same in ezPDF Reader text stays as is, so depending on magnification it could be completely unreadable. It’s big problem for me.
I would still recommend Lite version as navigation is perfect comparing to Adobe. And you have text reflow, if you need it. But if most of your PDFs are scanned pages then stay with Adobe.
[UDPATE] OK, now I’m pissed off. ezPDF Reader is on sale right now (December 14th) and costs only 0.1$! I’ve wasted money, but who knew:(
| 2011-11-15 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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*** This is the first post in Polish published on this blog. It can be the last one, but if there would be any in the future it would be clearly marked by “Polish” category. ***
W ciągu ostatnich kilku dni czytałem wiele dobrego o księgarni internetowej Ebookpoint.pl. A to, że ebooki są bez DRM, że są dostępne w trzech formatach w jednej cenie (pdf, mobi, epub), że jest możliwa wysyłka bezpośrednio na Kindle, itd. Jako, że potrzebowałem książki o negocjacjach sprawdziłem ofertę i znalazłem Jednominutowy Negocjator. Cena w porządku, więc przystąpiłem do zakupu. Jako, że nie mieszkam w Polsce i nie mam polskiego konta, wybrałem opcje płatności kartą, która wydawała mi się najszybszą. Zamówienie złożyłem w czwartek (10 listopad) o 21:25, wtedy też dokonałem płatności kartą. Książka była gotowa do pobrania w piątek (11 listopad) o 9:45. Tyle zabrało przetworzenie płatności.
W tym samym czasie zamówiłem książkę ze strony O’Reilly. Również płatność kartą. Książka była na moim dysku w niecałą minutę od zakończenia procedury zamówienia. Warto też wspomnieć, że była od razy gotowa do pobrania. W przypadku ebookpoint po otrzymaniu maila z potwierdzeniem, że książka jest gotowa zalogowałem się na moje konto, kliknąłem pobierz i wtedy dopiero rozpoczął się proces generacji ebooka.
Podsumowując, przed polskimi księgarniami internetowymi jeszcze długa droga. Może jest już lepiej niż było, ale w porównaniu do zachodu wciąż jesteśmy daleko w tyle. Oczyma wyobraźni widzę koszmary senne o wejściu Amazona do Polski, jakie z pewnością mają właściciele polskich księgarni. Zmiótłby “konkurencje” w ciągu miesiąca.
| 2011-10-24 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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Few days ago I’ve received email from my hosting provider (where I have my VPS, used only as proxy) that they were informed by some company (let them be anonymous this time) about copyright infringement taking place on my server. At thirst I was confused, then I’ve became shocked. As I have no HTTP or FTP server on my VPS installed, I’ve thought that it got compromised. So I’ve checked logs, folders, but found nothing. I’m using only 700 MB from 25GB provided disk space, so it would be rather easy to spot a porn movie (this was content they were referring to) on the drive. Then I’ve checked Google and I’ve found info that some image hosting site was using my IP before me and it was them who were hosting this movie (or just a screenshots from it, email was not very descriptive).
It calmed me down. But I thought that if I would host some serious content on my server I would probably not be very fond of being identified with site hosting porn. But what can you do. Number of IPv4 addresses is decreasing daily, so reuse (quite quick reuse) is inevitable. Maybe next time I would just do some quick query on Google after some ISP would assign me IP address.
| 2011-10-03 | Posted by Peter under Polskie blogi IT |
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Some time ago I’ve bought “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming. There was this promo on Amazon, so it cost only 3$ and I’ve said to myself why not. I’ve seen all Bond’s movies already, and liked them a lot (most of them at least), so why not to end this little ignorance and read the book it was based on. So I did. And I liked it, however movie not so much. Daniel Craig as Bond is not for me, and it was more action movie than typical Bond fantasy. I’ve liked the story, the way author written it. The details, like how to play Baccarat or how to make James self-invented drink. Yes, 007 was not always drinking Martini. He had his own drink, and after reading the novel I know why he stopped drinking it. It was intense, movie was shallow. And the best part of this story was that Bond wasn’t a super hero there, he was normal guy (well trained, but still human) with his doubts.
Then I’ve reached for another book about secret agent, “Live and Let Die“. And I was disappointed. I haven’t even finished it, I’ve left it in half-way. It was different. It lacked this special feeling. This time book was shallow, or maybe I just wasn’t in a mood.
Anyway, for now statistics look like this. I like all older Bond movies, even the ones with Pierce Brosnan. My favorite actor in that role is Sir Roger Moore, not Sean Connery. I hate all new ones with Daniel Craig, he’s just creepy as Bond, however he’s good actor in every other role. As for books, I love Casino Royale, and I believe for some time it would stay the only book of Ian Fleming I’ve read. Maybe it’s my ignorance again, but I really don’t find this peculiar kind of magic in it, which I found in movies.