In Outlook 2003, I have enabled the setting “show an envelope icon in the notification area”. With this setting enabled, whenever I get a new email, an envelope is displayed in the Windows system tray. I like this feature because it is less obtrusive and distracting than the methods of new email notification (e.g. Desktop Alerts, playing a sound, etc).
The only problem with this setting is that, by default, the envelope icon gets displayed even when the new email is spam (i.e junk email). …Continue reading » How to Hide the Outlook Envelope Icon When You Get Spam
Just for laughs, I recently created a point-to-point VPN (a.k.a. gateway-to-gateway VPN) between my home and the office. At the office, the VPN endpoint is a LinkSys RV042, which, as far as I can tell, runs Freeswan VPN software. At home, the VPN endpoint is a LinkSys WRT54GL, which I hacked to run the OpenWrt linux distribution and OpenSwan VPN software. A future post will detail exactly how I did this but the purpose of this post is to discuss how I got my Windows file shares to work across the VPN. …Continue reading » Accessing Windows Shares Across a VPN
I finally used Windows’ arp command for something useful.
Last week I was configuring numerous brand new LinkSys routers for various branch offices. After successfully configuring the first one, I plugged in the second and tried to connect to it’s web admin page. Unfortunately, my connection attempt kept on timing out. After a couple of minutes of pulling my hair out, I remembered something I had learned about in school a few years ago — Address Resolution Protocol or ARP for short. …Continue reading » Arp Tip
I use Cobian Backup to automatically backup my Outlook mail file (i.e. PST file) as well as other types of files. There is a catch with backing up PST files with Cobian Backup — Outlook cannot be running. If Outlook is running, Cobian will not backup the PST file because it will be locked by Outlook.
Luckily, Cobian has a feature called “events”, which can be used to run arbitrary tasks before and/or after a backup job. I use this feature to kill Outlook before running my backup job, which removes the file lock and allows Cobian to backup the PST file.
If you want to use this feature to kill Outlook, the first step is to create a batch file that can kill Outlook from the command line. I called my batch file “kill_outlook.bat”. Here are the contents: …Continue reading » How to Kill Outlook Before Backing Up Your PST file
