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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for March, 2022

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View multiple panes, sheets, or workbooks – Excel for Mac

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/31

Usually, I work in a single worsheet and workbook at a time.

Sometimes I use multiple worksheets or workbooks, and I never knew about the below feature.

The really cool aspect which is not in the below documentation: if you re-open a worksheet, it remembers the views and positions!

Learned a new thing and discovered a new thing (:

[WayBack] View multiple panes, sheets, or workbooks – Excel for Mac:

In Excel for Mac, you can split a sheet in to panes, view multiple sheets in one workbook, or view multiple workbooks at a time.

View multiple sheets in one workbook

  1. Open the workbook that you want to view.
  2. On the Window menu, click New Window.
  3. Switch to the new window, and then click the tab for the sheet that you want to view.Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each sheet that you want to view.
  4. On the Window menu, click Arrange.
  5. Do one of the following:
    To arrange windows So that they appear like this Click
    As equally sized, tiled squares Tiled windows Tiled
    Horizontally from top to bottom Horizontal windows Horizontal
    Vertically from right to left Vertical windows Vertical
    In an overlapping cascade from top to bottom Cascading windows Cascade
  6. Select the Windows of active workbook check box.

View multiple workbooks

  1. Open all the workbooks that you want to view.
  2. On the Window menu, click Arrange.
  3. Do one of the following:
    To arrange windows So that they appear like this Click
    As equally sized, tiled squares Tiled windows Tiled
    Horizontally from top to bottom Horizontal windows Horizontal
    Vertically from right to left Vertical windows Vertical
    In an overlapping cascade from top to bottom Cascading windows Cascade

–jeroen

Posted in Excel, Office, Office 2011 for Mac, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Speed up Upload and Download Speeds in Google Backup and Sync (formerly Google Drive)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/31

[Wayback] Speed up Upload and Download Speeds in Google Drive is still relevant, despite the name change of Google Drive to Google Backup and Sync.

In my experience (fiber 100 mebibit symmetric with less than 5 milliseconds latency to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange) the only option that really matters is to set the Proxy Settings from “auto-detect” to “direct connection”. This saves as much as 25% on latency, which plays a big role when syncing many small files.

These are the steps in pictures:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Google, GoogleBackupAndSync, GoogleDrive, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Figuring out which processes are preventing to eject/unmount my MacOS Time Machine backup USB drive

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/31

One day, a MacOS Time Machine backup USB drive could not me ejected/unmount.

These links helped me figure out what was wrong via [Wayback] find which macos program prevents unmount – Google Search:

  • [Wayback] macos – The volume can’t be ejected because it’s currently in use – Ask Different (Thanks [Wayback] CousinCocaine, [Wayback] Paul Gilfedder and [Wayback] Alan W. Smith)

    Q:

    • “The volume can’t be ejected because it’s currently in use.“
    • “The disk “Diskname” wasn’t ejected because one or more programs may be using it.“.
    • “umount(/Volumes/Diskname): Resource busy -- try 'diskutil unmount'“

    …

    My question: How do I know what program is using my drive so I can properly quit that program and eject my drive?

    The volume can't be ejected because it's currently in use. The disk "Camel" wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it. The disk "Mammtoh" wasn't ejected because one or more programs... xkcd

    A:

    lsof is indeed your best bet. The fastest and easiest way would be this :-

    sudo lsof /Volumes/myDrive

    It can take a couple minutes to run, but once it’s complete, it gives you a list of open files on the disk. The output will look something like this:

    COMMAND    PID  USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF  NODE NAME
mds         89  root   19r   DIR   52,3      432     2 /Volumes/Photos
mds         89  root   23r   DIR   52,3      432     2 /Volumes/Photos
Finder     681 alans   14r   DIR   52,3      432     2 /Volumes/Photos
QuickLook 2158 alans    9r   REG   52,3  1141591 78651 /Volumes/Photos/_tmp_iphone_10_backup/APC_1546.JPG

    In this case, it’s the QuickLook application that has a file open. Closing the application directly is the best way to fix the issue. However, that’s not always possible. For example, QuickLook doesn’t show up as an application you can get to in the Dock.

    If you can’t close the application manually, you can use the kill command to terminate it from the command line. To do that, use the PID from the second column as the ID to kill. From the above example, it would be:

    kill 2158

    Note that sometimes that doesn’t work and a more aggressive form of kill must be used. Here’s a series of escalating aggressiveness (using the example PID of 2158):

    kill 2158
sudo kill 2158
sudo kill -INT 2158
sudo kill -KILL 2158

    You should be able to eject the disk once the process/application has been killed.

    One final note, lsof can take a minute or two. It can also hang, but you should give it at least a few minutes before you decide that’s what happened.

    Also, sometimes the base command sudo lsof /Volumes/myDrive won’t find anything. If that happens, try adding the +D argument (i.e. sudo lsof +D /Volumes/myDrive). That will do a top down scan of the disk. It’ll take longer, but it should pick up anything that’s causing the disk to be un-ejectable.

    (Hat tip to Alec Jacobson’s post for extra details.)

    C:

    sudo lsof /Volumes/drive is much faster than sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/drive

  • [Wayback] Find out which application is using external hard drive in order to eject it « Alec’s Web Log
    sudo lsof +D "/Volumes/[name of drive]"

    …

    You can always run the lsof command again to see if the process really died.

    kill [PID of process]
sudo kill [PID of process]
sudo kill -INT [PID of process]
sudo kill -KILL [PID of process]
  • [Wayback] time machine – How do I make Spotlight stop indexing my Backup drive? – Ask Different (thanks [Wayback] hectorpal!)

    …

    I finally found you cannot disable Spotlight to index Backups.backupdb.

    [Wayback] Apple Support. OS X El Capitan: Spotlight preferences

    If you add a Time Machine backup disk to the privacy list, you will continue to see messages that Spotlight is indexing your backup disk. This indexing is necessary for Time Machine to function properly and can’t be disabled. Spotlight does exclude from searches any items you store on your backup disk that are not part of a Time Machine backup.

    …

  • [Wayback] If you can’t eject a disk from Mac – Apple Support

    If you can’t eject an external disk or storage device

    1. On your Mac, choose Apple menu  > Log Out, then log in again. Try to eject the disk again.
    2. If you still can’t eject the disk, choose Apple menu  > Shut Down. Disconnect the disk from your computer, then start up your computer again.

This figured out which processes were involved:

# sudo su -

# lsof +D /Volumes/Samsumg860Evo4TB

The main processes keeping file handles in use on the SSD device where mds and mds_stores (similar as in [Wayback] How to fix: The volume can’t be ejected because it’s currently in use). Killing spotlight did not help, and logoff failed as well: I had to shutdown the whole machine to be able to detach the USB drive.

So it was Spotlight galore all over again, which is odd, as this is a USB3 SSD for which the Time Machine backup had tried to update for more than 12 hours, so Spotlight – if indexing at all – should have been long done.

Spotlight galore:

The final solution was to perform a shutdown of the machine. It had not been for over 3 months, so apparently that caused some confusion for the combination of Spotlight and Time Machine.

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, SpotLight | Leave a Comment »

10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot – TechRepublic

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/30

For my link archive:

If your computer powers up okay, but the Windows XP operating system won’t boot properly, you have some troubleshooting ahead of you. Here’s a look at the likely culprits and what you can do to fix the problem.

[Wayback] 10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot – TechRepublic

Via: [Wayback/Archive.is] Product IDs – Lunarsoft Wiki

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Ziggo gooit ook analoog FM-signaal eruit: Televisie kijken zonder traditioneel abonnement? Dit zijn de opties – Kassa – BNNVARA

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/30

For my link archive as Ziggo is ditching the analog FM-signal rendering many devices inoperable in order to boost internet connectivity with a whopping 20 Mhz.

Switching to new hardware might as well give a much cheaper solution without Ziggo (need to check out at least NLZiet).

I wonder if Ziggo will really switch of the complete cable signal when ditching them, as I hear mixed information about that:

–jeroen

Posted in About, Cable TV/Radio, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Perkeep lets you permanently keep your stuff, for life.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/30

For my link archive: [Wayback] Perkeep

Via [Wayback] bradfitz – Joining Tailscale: Simplifying Networking, Authentication, and Authorization (which has many interesting linkis, including [Archive.is] bradfitz/homelab: Brad’s homelab setup)

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Hardware, Infrastructure, Network-and-equipment, Perkeep, Power User, Storage, Tailscale, VPN, Wireguard | Leave a Comment »

windows xp – How to know which license version has an XP installed system – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/29

When virtualising your final physical Windows XP machines (just in case you need to hook up old hardware that is unsupported from newer Windows versions), you need to figure out the kind of license of each physical Windows XP machine in order to stand a chance to keep it licensed.

This answer by [Wayback] Moab [Wayback] windows xp – How to know which license version has an XP installed system – Super User helped me a lot.

I tried to make it a bit easier to read:

  1. First obtain the “Product ID” from the Windows XP machine. It is derived from the original Windows XP installation product key and displays a few values:

    xxxxx-yyy-zzzzzzz-zzzzz

    • xxxxx: the MCP (Microsoft Product Code) describing which product version, or in case of Windows XP: what language, edition (like “Home” and “Pro”) and often some more information)
    • yyy: the Channel ID (especially important to set apart OEM from other channels; OEM is not allowed to be virtualised, so would need a complete new Windows XP key to be activated as Virtual Machine; Channel IDs being neither OEM nor VLK (volume license key) can often be re-activated, sometimes over the phone to explain the situation; I’ve not tried virtualising a VLK based Windows XP yet.
    • zzzzzzz-zzzzz: semi-random values

    [Wayback/Archive.is] Product IDs – Lunarsoft Wiki has quite detailed lists of not just the MCP and Channel ID values for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but also the disk volume labels and setup.ini label values.

    Often this is easier to do from the physical machine before virtualising it, but even afterwards you can get it by running Windows in Safe Mode, then use either of these to get the Product ID:

    1. Run the Windows Contol Panel applet sysdm.cpl which shows the “Product ID” us under the “Registerd to” information.
    2. From the console, run reg query "hklm\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion" /v ProductID
    3. From another machine or boot CD (like Hiren’s Boot CD or Windows Ultimate Boot CD), mount the hard disk, mount the registry hive, then show the above registry key value
    4. Download and run NirSoft [Wayback] ProduKey (which usually will give you both the Product ID and Product Key)
  2. From the product key, determine if you can re-activate Windows, either by phone, or by this link:

    [Archive.is] Self Service for Mobile

    I got the link from [Wayback] activate windows xp – Microsoft Community via [Wayback] windows xp – How do I activate WindowsXP now that support has ended? – Super User.

    Phone (in most countries) and on-line activation should still work; it worked in 2016 (see [Wayback] license – Will I still be able to activate Windows XP after support ends? – Super User) 2019 (see [Wayback] windows xp – How do I activate WindowsXP now that support has ended? – Super User) and 2020 (see [Wayback] XP activation – Windows XP Home and Professional).

  3. When OEM, try to obtain a legal Windows XP license key that matches the MCP, then change the key using steps in for instance:

    Note that it is no use searching Google for Windows XP License keys: Microsoft did and invalidated them back in the Windows XP SP1, SP2 and SP3 days: Wayback: Error message when you install Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) or Service Pack 2 (SP2): “The product key used to install Windows is invalid

     

The 2001 Windows XP Professional License is archived in the Wayback machine as Microsoft Windows XP Professional END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT: Windows%20XP_Professional_English_9e8a2f82-c320-4301-869f-839a853868a1.pdf (via [Wayback] Convert your existing Windows XP system into a virtual machine – TechRepublic).

Note this does not cover OEM or Volume Licenses.

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Bookmarklet to force WordPress classic-editor

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/29

A while ago, WordPress.com heavily started to de-emphasise the Classic Editor in order to boost the Gutenberg editor which is bloaty (in both browser DOM usage (heavily slowing down editing) and content (lots of meta tags that are added to blog source) and is missing essential features (especially nesting of blocks often breaks things).

With 7000+ blog posts in the Classic Editor format (a few in still supported markdown format: that experiment failed horribly!) that still require editing  (especially because of link rot)

So here is the Bookmarklet code to switch back an editing URL that you can use for as long as the Classic Editor is there:

javascript:location.href=document.location.href+'&classic-editor';

Yup, it is that simple: it appends &classic-editor to the URL.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, Internet, link rot, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, WordPress, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

Some links on Tailscale / Wiregard

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/29

For my link archive:

Related: [Wayback] Using Tailscale on Windows to network more easily with WSL2 and Visual Studio Code – Scott Hanselman’s Blog

–jeroen

Posted in Hardware, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Tailscale, VPN, Wireguard | Leave a Comment »

Hatig all these on-line portals of banks, mortgage/insurance companies, energy/water suppliers to get yearly information out: too disparate, too many UX steps

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/28

In the past, life was simple: you got yearly statements of many institutions like banks, mortgage/insurance companies, energy/water suppliers.

Those statements all had the same process:

  1. sent in an envelope
  2. statement were on scannable paper (A4 over here in The Netherlands)
  3. my Fujitsu ScanSnap ix1500 scanner (in the past a somewhat less fast Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 scanner) scans and OCRs the statement into a portable and reasonable named PDF file in less than 30 seconds
  4. copy paste the required information into my administration software

Now it is a disparate mess of processes:

  • some come by email, but in various formats, often getting automatically deleted or bounced because some marketing person got their KPI, put too much trackers in it or made it look too much like advertisements
  • most by now are to be manually downloaded via portals
    • in all sorts of forms and user experience
    • having credentials that often expire within a year and need to be renewed (a lengthy process as incoming email need to go through a greylist in order to lessen SPAM)
    • demonstrating slow PDF generation (often 10s of seconds)
    • download them in formats needing post processing (like ZIP files containing the PDF files, filenames with names like “Download.pdf” )
  • often getting bitmap PDFs that have no OCR: just a plain bitmap that you have to type all information from

Based on [Wayback] Thread by @jpluimers: Ik wordt doodmoe van al die on-line omgevingen van banken, verzekeraars en al die andere shit die je voor de belastingdienst bij elkaar moet zoeken. Je bent gewoon een dag bezig……

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

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