How-To

by wooter on BMW, How-To, Z4

Perspective view on a MK4 BMW navigation

If you have a BMW MK4 satellite navigation system, you can upgrade to one of the later versions of the operating system to access the 3D perspective viewpoint on top of the 2D viewpoint.

The steps to do this are:

  1. Get to the secret settings menu.  You do this by going into the Settings menu and holding the MENU button down for about 10 seconds.  When you see this menu, scroll down until you see Perspective where you can select whether you want this option activated or not
  2. Go out of this menu and go into the NAVIGATION menu.  In the Viewpoints, you now have three choices: north, driving direction or perspective mode.  Select the last one and see the map turn into 3D.
 
by wooter on How-To, Software

IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe GPEN200N on Mac OSX

In 2008, I was still using laptops running Windows, and had a project which included having many meetings with alot of people.  I found the process of retyping my on paper written notes onto my OneNote application tedious and felt I could spent my time more productive.

Visiting Canada, I found a digital pen called the Mobile Digital Scribe from IOGear (GPEN200N) for 99$ which did not need special paper, but worked with a special pen and a sensor you could place on any surface, to register all notes I would write on paper.  With the simple included software, I could easily integrate my handwritten notes into OneNote.

Not long later,  however, I switched to a MacBook Pro running OSX and was unable to use the digital pen any longer, since there was no such support on Mac.  I could use the device connected to my MacBook as a mouse, but not really for taking notes.

Up until I did some research…

… →

 
by wooter on Accessories & Mods, BMW, Gadgets, How-To, Ipod, Z4

Intravee Ipod-adapter in a BMW Z4 RoadsterIntravee Ipod-adapter in een BMW Z4 Roadster

Intravee

The Intravee is an innovative piece of hardware that enables BMW’s of the previous generation to accept Ipods as sound source, and use the radio and steering controls to navigate through the Ipod’s structure.  This Intravee enables E39 5-series, E46 3-series, the first model of X3’s and the first model of Z4 roadster and coupe owners to enjoy their Ipod in their car.

… →

 
by wooter on Excel, How-To, IT, Microsoft, PowerShell

Excel automation with Powershell

Powershell is Microsoft’s answer of decent shell scripting on the Windows platform. Equipped with the functions you would expect from VBScript, it behaves as an Unix shell script would. All commands can work from the command line, or as a set of instructions in a file.

Adding to the basic shell functions one would expect, such as file and directory manipulation, reading and writing text files, manipulating strings with regular expressions, Powershell also integrates with .NET 2.0 and higher to communicate with other functions, such as accessing the System.Windows.Forms object to make neat forms equipped with all the controls you would expect in a compiled application, or in this case: manipulating Excel workbooks.

Using Excel together with PowerShell can be very easy. Too bad the documentation is sparse on this topic, and the official documentation makes no mention of a workaround that is needed when using Excel with PowerShell on a machine which is not configured with regional settings set to EN-us. … →

 
by wooter on Exchange, How-To, IT, Microsoft

Cannot install an update? Try this workaround.

One of many Microsoft patches used the Microsoft Update.exe Package Installer and that got me almost into trouble tonight…

The Update.exe Package Installer relies on Update.inf to check wheither the update, patch or hotfix is suited for the operating system and patch levels of your application.  Normally, this poses no problem, but at times you might have something running which was supported, and then not. … →

 
css.php