Category: Applications

Install Edge browser via Powershell
article #1491, updated 95 days ago

This works well as of this writing.

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = "tls12, tls11, tls"
md -Path $env:temp\edgeinstall -erroraction SilentlyContinue | Out-Null
$Download = join-path $env:temp\edgeinstall MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi
Invoke-WebRequest 'http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=2093437'  -OutFile $Download
Start-Process "$Download" -ArgumentList "/quiet"
# placeholder for "enter" autokeyhit

This is a change to a replacement URL, and it will hopefully be a more lasting kind than the previous. The above works for AMD64 Windows; the URL comes from here:

techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/official-download-links-for-microsoft-edge-stable-enterprise/m-p/1082549

and there is support for other platforms on that page.

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New Bible application, cross-platform: Ezra
article #1544, updated 236 days ago

It’s a recent and active development, works very well, very nicely functional. Currently runs on Windows, macOS and Linux desktop computers, as well as on Android devices and Chromebooks. Uses the Sword Project repositories. The UI is a bit different than others, but it’s very well worth the learn.

ezrabibleapp.net/

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Betterbird: Vastly Improved Fork of Thunderbird
article #1520, updated 351 days ago

Try it. https://www.betterbird.eu/. The Thunderbird team has been ignoring huge quantities of bugs and usability issues for decades. They kicked out a profoundly gifted developer several years ago, who has been leading Betterbird, a careful “soft fork” of Thunderbird, which maintains all helpful interoperability while fixing many, many bugs. Betterbird is lighter and faster, it does CardDav address books natively to Gmail and other providers, it has a far better HTML email composer, and much, more more!

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Cross-Linux Package Management: Snapcraft
article #1184, updated 2139 days ago

Lots and lots of interesting apps can be installed easily, and across distros, with Snapcraft:

snapcraft.io/store

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End-of-life of common Microsoft products
article #1055, updated 2470 days ago

Recently a Microsoft page on the subject went missing, and the replacement doesn’t seem to work in any browser. Here’s a regularly updated one from ZDNet with just Windows and Office:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-will-microsoft-pull-the-plug-on-your-version-of-windows-or-office/

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A Great Alternative to Visio
article #1035, updated 2554 days ago

This one is very good:
http://lucidchart.com

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Print-to-PDF using Ghostscript
article #959, updated 2832 days ago

This page appears a bit outdated, but it should still work:

https://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

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New web browser
article #765, updated 3380 days ago

Looking rather interesting so far; it is very multiplatform:

http://www.qupzilla.com

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Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader direct downloads
article #695, updated 3569 days ago

Here’s Flash Player:

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

and here’s Reader:

http://get.adobe.com/reader/enterprise/

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"Too Many Different Cell Formats" in Excel
article #640, updated 3699 days ago

Microsoft says:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213904

that this is due to accumulating cell format IDs over time, when Excel documents have been used and updated over and over again. Microsoft says that this can be prevented in new Excel files by keeping Excel up to date, but does not give an automatic solution this way. Instead, when the problem is seen, we have to run a utility on the Excel file throwing the error. I found a very small binary in the SkyDrive account referred-to in the article above, called XLCleaner; this works quite well. I did not choose any of the checkboxes in my testing, they look like they might alter spreadsheet contents, and they did not appear to be necessary.

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