Some Notes on the Machines

VirtualBox, portable, on Windows. Amazing.

http://www.vbox.me/

Adobe is supporting Flash less and less on Linux. Google Chrome was the way to do it for a while, but then Google abandoned 32-bit platforms, and there are a lot of 32-bit users who want full Flash web-site compatibility. There still is 32-bit Flash code out there, but making it work can still be very confusing on many Linux platforms. Happily, as is the wonderful modus operandi in the Linux world, an enquiring mind figured it out, and gave us a way. It’s here:

https://gist.github.com/ruario/215c365facfe8d3c5071

A quick way to apply it, is to run these commands in order:

cd ~
wget https://gist.github.com/ruario/215c365facfe8d3c5071/raw/1d7e5838b14df0da694638ba59b1c97232b01bb8/latest-pepper-flash.sh
chmod +x latest-pepper-flash.sh
./latest-pepper-flash.sh

Flash does not show up as an Extension, but it appears to work very well, you can verify it on Adobe’s check page.

As of “Wave 15” of Office 365, there is enterprise-wide, a.k.a. global, automatic signature capability. It’s in Exchange -> mail flow -> rules, and it involves setting a disclaimer message, but there is extensive user-data variable substitution. A full description is here:

http://365command.com/justins-tech-tip-of-the-week-global-email-signatures-for-office-365/

Excellent procedure here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj853293.aspx

Best information is now here for Windows and other software firewalls:

http://help.logmein.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/How-do-I-configure-my-firewall-to-work-with-LogMeIn-en1

There is a link in the above for “whitelisting information” which really has the skinny for hardware firewalls:

http://help.logmein.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/Whitelisting-and-LogMeIn

The amazing David Lewis recently discovered something very close to unbelievable. A user profile on a PC — not a user, not a PC — had full administrative rights to a folder on a server on the domain, where the user was explicitly denied such rights. Deletion and replacement of the user profile, eliminated the problem.

Today I found it ridiculously difficult to download IE11 on a Windows 7 box which had not seen updates in a while. If you suffer so, browse here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/18520/download-internet-explorer-11-offline-installer

Offline installers in many languages.

Rather a neat tool:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Can eliminate a lot of issues in Explorer.

There are many situations in which a recent version of Excel will report that there is not enough available memory or disk space, where there very clearly is. To knock this one out, go to File menu and Options, click Trust Center on the left, click Trust Center Settings… on the right, and then Protected View on the left. Uncheck everything in there, and OK all the way out. Close Excel and try it again. Problem eliminated.

This is a new one, both Windows and Linux. Based on Chromium, the core of Chrome. Amazingly fast and efficient. Includes recent Adobe Flash, in both 32-bit and 64-bit. This is very probably the fastest and most efficient 32-bit browser with Flash in the world right now.

http://www.slimjet.com/