Blogging

BuzzNet to Blogger woes

by Neil.B.Ennis May 31, 2007 No Comments Shortlink

There was a cool feature at BuzzNet.com. It let you email a photo to a secret email address and would then create a blog entry at BuzzNet from the email. Really handy when you were on the road, had some nice photos, and wanted to upload them quickly without stuffing around with URL’s and HTML image references and crap like that.

What was also nice was the BlogThis! facility that let you convert the new BuzzNet entry into a Blog Entry here at Blogger.

After I upgraded to Blogger’s new gmail accounts, I was unable to use the BlogThis! facility at BuzzNet.

I’ve been stuffing around with this for ages, and every time I tried to get BuzzNet to talk to Blogger I got errors, and it wouldn’t retrieve a list of Blogs.

Eventually I gave up in disgust and tried Flickr.Com.

It works! Perfectly! Easily!

I created a new Flickr account, told it that I had a Blogger account, and it directed me to a page at Google which let me authorize Flickr to update my blog.

Now I can email a photo to a Flickr address, and it automatically creates a new Blog entry for me.

Next time I go on a cruise, I’m all set to upload my new photos every day without spending hours trying to figure out all the HTML references.

I am a very happy camper. If anyone else has this problem with Buzznet – forget them – just upgrade to Flickr and make your life easier.

Harrdware

Laptop Runs like a Dog

by Neil.B.Ennis April 11, 2007 1 Comment Shortlink

My laptop has been running slowly for months. I thought I had problems with the CPU temperature, the CPU itself, spywarre, viruses, global warming, little green men – you name it.

The penny finally dropped. (D’OH!)

My power management settings were set to “Default Power Scheme”. So Windows was throttling the CPU to reduce power usage and extend the life of my battery. That’s useless to me because my computer is rarely un-plugged.

I changed it to “Minimal Power Management” and WHOOOOSH!!!!! It’s running as fast as it used to.

Nice to have decent laptop power again. I’ve been putting up with crawling speeds for months. If only I’d found this solution earlier!

Software

Outlook 2003 Runs like a Dog

by Neil.B.Ennis January 25, 2007 No Comments Shortlink

I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of CPU time consumed by MS-Outlook 2003 on my laptop.

When Autoarchive runs every morning at 9am, the system grinds to a halt. There’s no way in Outlook you can change the TIME at which this process runs. So my solution to the problem is to disable Autoarchive, wait till midnight, enable it, and tell it to run every day. That way I won’t be around while it’s archiving. How stupid that I have to stay up till midnight because MS products don’t work properly. Does anyone know any better solutions to this?

The other contributing factor is my archive folders. I have them visible in the folder window that appears on the left hand side of outlook – so I can see “Mailbox – Me”, “Personal Folders”, “Archives” etc down the left hand side. I thought this might be slowing things down a bit, so I right-clicked on the Archove and Personal Folders, selected “Close”, and the folder disappeared from view. After I did this, Outlook seemed to consume less CPU time, so I think I’ve solved this problem.

One final thing that might be adding to the overall slowness is the fact that my main outlook mail folder connects through a VPN to my exchange server (i.e. its not local to me). I think the combination of VPN and Exchange might be using up a lot of CPU.

Surely there must be something better?