Turn off Firefox “This connection is not secure”

Firefox is looking out for us but the “This connection is not secure. Logins entered here could be compromised.” message on logins annoys me so I looked up how to turn it off. Do so at your own risk.

In the address bar type: about:config and hit enter.

Read the warning message!

In the search box type: security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled
Change the setting from true to false. Again do so at your own risk.

Clonezilla – Mismatched GPT and MBR error


While trying to clone a hard drive (a SSD drive in this case) I kept getting an error that stated “this disk contains mismatched gpt and mbr”.
I found the following instructions which fixed the problem for me.
Be careful with these instructions. They are messing with the partition table and you could make your system not able to boot.
From the Clonezilla command prompt (on the second screen select enter_shell).

# sudo gdisk /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.7.2

Partition table scan:
MBR: MBR only
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present

Found valid MBR and GPT. Which do you want to use?
1 – MBR
2 – GPT
3 – Create blank GPT

Your answer: 1
Command (? for help): x

Expert command (? for help): z
About to wipe out GPT on /dev/sda. Proceed? (Y/N): y
GPT data structures destroyed! You may now partition the disk using fdisk or
other utilities.
Blank out MBR? (Y/N): n <— do NOT choose Y!
MBR is unchanged. You may need to delete an EFI GPT (0xEE) partition
with fdisk or another tool.

Internet Explorer’s Meet your new browser page keeps coming up

Internet Explorer (version 11 in my case) keeps popping up the “Meet your new browser” page every time I opened the application.
Use these steps to stop it:

  1. GPEDIT.MSC from the Start button search bar
  2. Expand User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Internet Explorer
  3. Double click “Prevent running First Run wizard” (in the right pane)
  4. Set it to Enabled and set Go Directly To Home Page from the drop down.

Activate Office 2010 manually

Microsoft-Office-2010-Logo

To force Microsoft Office 2010 to activate manually open a command prompt (I assume with elevated privileges):

For 32bit:

cscript “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

For 64bit:

cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

This is assuming that you’ve given Office a product key.  I also think this will work for Office 2013 by changing the Office14 to Office15 because that same ospp.vbs script is present in my copy of Office 2013.  I’m not sure if this works for retail versions of Office.  I only deal with volume licenses in my environment.

Outlook issue: Calendar sharing is not available with the following entries because of permission settings on your network.

We use Exchange 2013 and Outlook 2010 at my work.  I had a few people trying to share their calendar to others in the organization.
When they tried this they received the following error message:

“Calendar sharing is not available with the following entries because  of permission settings on your network.”

Well I’m the network and Exchange admin and I know I haven’t intentionally setup anything to block sharing of calendars.  After a bit of playing around I found a strange but easy fix.

When you select the person you want to share the calendar with make sure you click the to button and select the person you want to share with from the global address list.If you simply start typing the users name in the to box you’ll get Outlook’s cached version of a user and that will give you the permissions error.

I found this issue to be present in Outlook 2010 as well as Outlook 2013.

How to launch XBMC on startup in Windows 8

I’ve yet to find a device or software that I like as much as XBMC for streaming videos from a local network on a TV.
My Roku tends to get used mostly for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Pandora.  There still not a good local network streaming app on the Roku that doesn’t rely on transcoding.  I like the pure experience of viewing a video file, no matter the type (avi,mpg,mp4,mkv,etc.)   XBMC does this and gives my videos a good looking interface.  For this reason I use a small PC (Intel NUC with Core i3, model DC3217IYE) for streaming videos from my local network.

I recently upgraded my HTPC to Windows 8 which like a lot.  The problem is the Windows Start Screen gets in the way and doesn’t easily let a desktop app run full screen at start up.  I poked around the web and found a few methods for getting it running but didn’t really like any of them too well.  Putting a shortcut in the start up folder doesn’t necessarily work.  There’s a group policy you can change that sets XBMC to be the default interface but then you can’t easily get back to the desktop when you want to.  Then I found XBMC launcher and it took care of my whole setup with minimum configuration.

The application is perfect and super easy to use.  It even adds some power icons to the desktop and or start screen.

Because of the nature of the internet and how things tend to disappear sometimes I have a copy of the current install (version 4.0) on my site here.  You should try to get it from the XBMC site itself though to make sure you have the most recent version.